lotsa people hate microsoft exchange… even more hate microsoft outlook (for very valid reasons)… i personally find both annoying, yet at the same time very useful when used together. there really aren’t many other solutions that piece together mail+calendar+contacts well enough for the everyday non-technical user to use.

I was pretty excited when I first heard about the OSAF, a group developing Chandler… essentially an opensource exchange+outlook replacement. Now there’s also OpenGroupware.org… basically targetting exchange as well.

Why can’t we all just get along?

So OSAF is lead by Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus (yeah, Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus notes… those guys). Supposedly they have some serious brain power over there.

As far as I can tell, OpenGroupware.org is a spin off of OpenOffice.org, however is NOT sponsored by Sun (which they are quick to point out).

Really now, wouldn’t it be a great idea for these groups to work together? Maybe they already are and I’m just to lazy to read through everything, but Exchange already has a huge installation base and following. If you really want to gain momentum on a project as huge as this, I would think the open source community would rally together, rather than develop to completely separate projects with the same goal.

Anyway, if you are at all interested, here are some relevant links:

http://www.osafoundation.org/
http://www.opengroupware.org/
http://news.com.com/2100-1012-1024994.html a CNET story on OpenGroupware.org