Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation (ars technica)

Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation (ars technica)

Posted Jul 26, 2008 10:48 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation (ars technica) by rfunk
Parent article: Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation (ars technica)

The POI Java library (which parses Microsoft file formats) seems to be the Apache software Microsoft wish to encourage.

On the plus side, a usable specification for MAPI and Exchange 2007 can only help in getting Linux mail clients which can talk with Microsoft mail servers. The current lack of good integration with Exchange is a large obstacle for many business people who try Linux on their personal computer. Linux become the Swiss Army Officers' Knife of computer networking by supporting every protocol, and perhaps that is the way forward for the Linux desktop.

I did try Novell's new MAPI plugin for Evolution. It didn't work against my employer's Exchange 2003 server and the convoluted build process for the plugin's source code didn't encourage me to fix this.

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On the MAPI plugin issue, OpenChange (unrelated to the Apache foundation) is being brought
into Debian and Fedora, with packages for this and their build dependencies (such as Samba4)
pending review for inclusion into these distributions.