Free (as in "free speech") access to Microsoft Exchange [LWN.net]

From:		Jules Colding <colding-AT-omesc.com>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Free (as in "free speech") access to Microsoft Exchange
Date:		Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:32:40 +0200

Dear LWN,

The Danish Open Source company OMC has released Brutus. Brutus is a free
development framework distributed under the GPL that offers access to
all of MAPI and therefore to all versions of Microsoft Exchange from 5.5
onwards.

Brutus is a complete wrapping of all of MAPI into a (large) set of CORBA
interfaces. Brutus enables an organization to upgrade almost any
groupware client to integrate seamlessly into any organization with
large Exchange deployments and to be feature-by-feature compatible with
MS Outlook. 

Office suites such as OpenOffice will now be able to offer a complete
office solution to replace MS Office, including MS Outlook, even in
organizations with a large existing Exchange infrastructure.

Please visit <http://www.omesc.com/>> for more information.


Best regards,
  Jules Colding, OMC

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Free (as in "free speech") access to Microsoft Exchange

Posted Sep 9, 2004 19:42 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Amazing. Why haven't I heard of this before?

Theoretically this should make it possible to do things like backup MS Exchange to a Linux box with a Python script. Such a script would make some people, including me, very happy.

We use Exchange 5.5 (trying to get rid of it for a Linux solution, but finding a good one is proving difficult). Backup is currently giving us fits (I've concluded that ArcServeIT is a festering pile of elephant dung).

What I want to know is are there any sample scripts or applications to access this thing from Perl or Python? I've searched and have yet to find any. :(

If anyone else has interest in making a backup application or Exchange -> Postfix migration from this with perl or python, I'd gladly join the project! Probably can't do it myself though.

Free (as in "free speech") access to Microsoft Exchange

Posted Sep 10, 2004 12:17 UTC (Fri) by colding (guest, #843) [Link]

We have been lying low until we had a product to show, including working sample code ;-)

You have, technically speaking, almost limitless possibilities for your client application. You can connect to Brutus/Exchange as long as a CORBA binding exist for your implementation language of choice, or as long as you can call external code (think CGI scripts) with your application. Perl or Python are certainly a possibility as both seems to have decent CORBA bindings.

Please join brutus-devel (see here for details), download the code and go use it :-)