teamXchange goes Open Source

Munich, 2009-01-28 – VIPcom releases platform-independent groupware solution as open source under the AGPL

„Today VIPcom, a leading provider of platform-independent communication and groupware solutions, announced Conversations, the open source edition of its teamXchange product which provides an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. "By releasing the source code of Con-versations under the AGPL we enter a new era in groupware development.", Klaus Frese, CEO of VIPcom GmbH explains."We are providing open access to our implementation of MAPI, while our users also gain the possibility of contributing to the development of Conver-sations. "Together with OpenMapi we hope to work with the open source community to sup-port a development which paves the way to new applications and platforms that will go far beyond the scope of existing groupware solutions." Conversations will also be made avail-able as a reliable and supported, subscriptions-based enterprise solution (teamXchange) for customers who want to benefit from the decades of experience of VIPcom GmbH.

Conversations is the only platform-independent open source groupware solution for Linux, Unix and Windows with a nearly complete implementation of the MAPI protocol. 

Requests by Outlook are not translated to other protocols using plugins and passed on to alternative backends, but served directly using "push" technology. This ensures high reliability and com-patibility and leads to a scalable solution. The enterprise edition already provides full support for BlackBerry devices and will support other mobile platforms like Android, iPhone and Palm pre in the near future.

Well documented programming interfaces and a powerful Java interface provide developers and ISVs with an outstanding platform to build upon and integrate with custom applications. The commitment of VIPcom GmbH to open source development is further emphasized by being a major contributor of the middleware OpenMapi (http://www.openmapi.org), an open, platform-independent MAPI implementation, which aims to connect any client and application to a variety of groupware solutions like Conversations. "We are glad to use Conversations as our reference implementation in the OpenMapi-Stack.", Thomas Uhl, CEO of TOPALIS AG and initiator of OpenMapi.org said. The OSBL development group of Wilken (Ulm, Germany), has developed a powerful web-based client based on the Conversations interfaces for the Java platform, further adding to the capabilities Conversations already offers. (For more in-formation, see http://osbl.wilken.de/wiki/index.php/con:nect).

The source code of Conversations will be made available for download on the website of OpenMapi at http://www.openmapi.org in early February.

The enterprise edition will be available from the website of VIPcom at http://www.vipcomag.de

Binary packages of the enterprise edition for up to 5 users for most Linux distributions and a 30 day trial for Windows are available as well.




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