Open-Xchange announced a Virtual "appliance" for its open source project Open-Xchange Server 0.8 - giving developers and the open source community the popular collaboration platform to run in a VMware Virtual Appliance.

Virtual Open-Xchange for Debian is available free for testing and evaluation  and will enable users to quickly and easily install the leading open source collaboration suite on VMware virtual machines - essentially creating a virtual collaboration appliance. Open-Xchange plans to produce these customized images for enterprise Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server - enabling advanced functionality with little or no end user complexity.

Open-Xchange  is the  provider of open source collaboration software. Its flagship product, Open-Xchange Server 5, provides key messaging functions like email, calendaring, contacts and task management - fully integrated with advanced groupware features such as document sharing, project tracking, user forums, and a knowledge base. Open-Xchange Server 5 works with 'rich clients' such as Microsoft Outlook as well as most browsers and mobile devices.

With the new agreement, Open-Xchange can be installed once and easily deployed throughout the data center using VMware's sophisticated management tools. Open-Xchange can offer customers and partners support for Open-Xchange in virtual environments. Pre-built images - or templates - that can be easily created by partners or customers, dropped into a virtual machine pre-configured and ready to use. Mass deployments get incredibly cost-effective.

Open-Xchange enables easy migration and integration to an open source environment - allowing IT administrators to create and implement killer-apps without changing existing infrastructure components, i.e. databases, directory services, message transfer agents, e-mail servers or web-servers. End users can keep their favorite mail and groupware client -- most often Outlook, but also all common web browsers.

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