Open-Xchange Publishes Position Paper on AJAX and Collaboration Software

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Wednesday, July 12, 2006; 05:50 AM

Open-Xchange, Inc. posted the second in a series of position papers intended to review the forces changing the market for information technology in general and collaborative solutions in specific. These position papers are written by the software analyst, Daniel Kusnetzky, who is the Executive Vice President, Market Strategy, Open-Xchange Inc. The second position paper, “AJAX — A New Face for Client/Server computing” can be found on the Open-Xchange, Inc. website http://www.open-xchange.com/EN/news/position.html

Distributed computing architectures have been evolving for decades. Competitive pressures force organizations to fully utilize the lower cost computing cycles offered by inexpensive desktop computers and industry standard servers in the data center. Today’s Internet and Web-based applications are the culmination of this process. Asynchronous JavaScropt and XML (AJAX) is a tool meant to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. Is AJAX the key to reliable, scalable and secure applications or does the key lie somewhere else?

The Position Paper explains how collaboration software in general, and Open-Xchange Server specifically, must have supporting technology first if it hopes to help organizations to respond to competitive pressures and achieve their strategic goals.

The company's flagship product is Open-Xchange Server 5: an inexpensive collaboration server . It works with various brands of browsers, PDA’s and rich clients. Its features include Documail, the integration of document sharing and email, Smart Links, Smart Permissions, and Universal Access. Organizations use Open-Xchange Server’s GUI-based administration module featuring Tiered Entitlement to implement role-based user management.

Open-Xchange Server 5 supports the two leading Enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat and SUSE and the Collax Business Server. Innovative connectors, OXtenders, enhance customer flexibility by using open standard APIs to integrate existing IT infrastructures, or extend capabilities to mobile devices, fax servers, back-up utilities, email archiving tools and Samba administration tools.

Launched in August 2004, Open-Xchange’s open source project is licensed under the General Public License for the software program and the Creative Commons, Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike or CC:by-nc-sa for the digital content or Web Access Add-on. Open-Xchange Server is ranked #4 out of 358 groupware projects on the freshmeat.net website, #1 in document repositories, #4 in handhelds, and the #163 most popular overall project, out of more than 40,000 listed projects. The Open-Xchange community website, http://www.open-xchange.org, is visited by more than 200,000 unique visitors each month. On average, each month, the community version of Open-Xchange Server is downloaded more than 6,000 times. Open-Xchange Server 5 was awarded Best Open Source Solution at LinuxWorld Expo. The readers of ServerWatch awarded Open-Xchange Server best Messaging and Collaboration Solution.