I was excited to hear Nat and Miguel talking about The Hula Project yesterday as I was catching up on my feeds.
Hula is an email and calendaring server. I think they’re taking the right approach: instead of trying to do everything for everybody they’re going to focus on email and calendar. They’re going to try to make the best darned email and calendar server out there. They’re also looking to make of Javascript and DHTML to create a rich web UI.
I have to say that I’d love to have something like this. A month or two ago I spent a few weeks off and on banging on OPEN-XCHANGE. I tried several times to get the prereqs right so that I could build slapd from source and then build OPEN-XCHANGE in order to be able to configure all of the stuff that needed to be configured. At first I got stuck near the top of the Debian install instructions. Then I got stuck in the middle, and by the time I had written a shell script to do most of the dirty work, I got stuck at adding the LDAP user. I also looked at installing OpenGroupware but a lackluster attempt at figuring out what to do with nightly build .debs I gave up.
I’m going to repurpose a box and put Debian unstable on it (testing has an older version of automake) to play with Hula, as it seems like it has the easiest build/install process so far:
./configure
make
su make install
Granted there is some configuration to do after that, but from what I’ve heard in #hula on freenode the process is quite easy.
That’s not to say that I’ve stopped looking at alternatives to iCal-over-webdav or Exchange or an exchange workalike for my calendaring and general togetherness. I’d love to see a livecd with openexchange already running on it. For now I think I’ll build Hula and see what the buzz is about. I’m confident that it’s going to progress and improve quickly.