By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hewlett-Packard Co, looking eagerly at the phenomenal growth in the Linux market, has announced that it is working on a port of its OpenMail 6.0 messaging and collaboration software from HP-UX to Linux. HP says that the port, which is now available as a free beta at www.hp.com/go/openmail, will be finished in September.
Like the versions of OpenMail for HP-UX, AIX and Solaris, the Linux implementation will support Microsoft’s Outlook email, calendaring and scheduling client. (OpenMail for Unix is the only non-Windows platform to support Outlook). The Linux implementation, which will initially be certified Red Hat Linux, will also support HP’s new OpenMail 6.0 web client.
Nigel Upton, general manager of the OpenMail business, says that by porting the OpenMail client, which is used by some 11 million HP customers worldwide, will give Linux users an alternative to generic shareware and open source email clients and servers. HP didn’t give any indication of what it would be charging for the Linux edition of OpenMail. The company says that it will be targeting both service providers and enterprise customers. Until now, OpenMail has appealed mostly to enterprises, but when it is available for Linux, provided that the performance and reliability is better than Sendmail and other programs popularly used by ISPs, HP could actually start seeing its software being used in the ISP community.
HP says that OpenMail is designed to support millions of email users on a single, big Unix server, which certainly will play well as the company tries to peddle e-business services. The company plans to release the OpenMail client as an open source program, but says that it has no plans to do the same for the OpenMail server. HP says it will deliver OpenMail 6.5 by the end of the year, which will feature offline message folder synchronization, and in early 2000 it will deliver OpenMail 7.0, which will support more platforms and will include a message archive manager.
