[imp] "big three" webmail providers courting campus

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:

>> Our students don't complain so much about the interface (which is
>> surprising since we serve around 80,000 staff and students).  Though
>> we do get a lot of requests for AJAX-like functionality.  Drag and
>> drop sort of thing.  But the big one is a calendar... but since the
>> bigwings have a death grip on their exchange servers for the 2000 of
>> them or so that use it we need to find something that will
>> communicate with it.  I'm hoping Kronolith will do that someday...
>
> Not without sponsoring. This is not a feature any of the current
> developers is interested in, and I think that if your people insist on
> using (and paying) Exchange, they can probably afford this sponsorship
> as well.

To add my own take on this: it sort of depends what you mean by  
"communicate with exchange". Microsoft makes it very hard to talk to  
exchange from non-microsoft clients, and for good reason - it's their  
lock in feature. They put a lot of work into calendaring before other  
companies or the open source community had anything comparable, and  
that's why people use Exchange - I've never heard of anyone using it  
for the mail server, for example.

On the other hand it's gotten a lot better at playing nicely with  
things like iTip, as has IMP. So maybe you could clarify what you'd  
need? Do you really need to take the administrators off of exchange in  
order to give the students Kronolith?

-chuck