Openchange

OpenChange aims to provide a portable Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols.

Exchange is a groupware server designed to work with Microsoft Outlook, and providing features such as a messaging server, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks.

Two main aspects are;

• Provide interoperability with Exchange protocols.
  

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  This is the MAPI library development purpose (libmapi). MAPI stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface and is used within Microsoft Exchange. The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients and offer native compatibility first with Exchange server; and in a near future with OpenChange server. Novell Gnome Evolution and KDE Akonadi (KMail, Mailody) are using the OpenChange MAPI library to access Microsoft Exchange servers natively.



• Provide a transparent replacement to Microsoft Exchange Server with native Exchange protocols support and direct communication with Microsoft Outlook.

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  This basically means that OpenChange server won't need any plugin installation in Outlook. The server is tighly linked to Samba4 since it is developed as an endpoint module for smbd (the samba server daemon) and is part of the mapiproxy project, an Exchange proxy which can act as a transparent gateway and/or progressively and seamlessly replace an Exchange server with openchange.

The Openchange project was founded in 2003 at EPITECH by Julien Kerihuel in the context of his Epitech Innovative Project. Julien is the project manager, lead developer. The OpenChange team is now made up Samba, KDE developers and Epitech students.

During this years Gsoc 2009, Three students

Student	Project	Mentor	Status
Ryan Lepinski	Exchange2Ical tool	Brad Hards	accepted
andrey yakubovich	Thunderbird Integration with OpenChange	jelmer vernooij	accepted
billy okal	GRAPHICAL FRONT END FOR OPENCHANGE	julien kerihuel	accepted

will be working on different projects for Openchange in the above projects over the summer.