The up-and-coming collaborating software Open-Xchange today announced a new mobility add-on to their platform. Thew new add-on is named OXtender for Business Mobility (apparently that’s the shortest name they could come up with).
For those of you who never heard about Open-Xchange before, it is an open source groupware software. In many ways, it resembles Microsoft Exchange (hence the name Open-Xchange).
This new add-on adds support for ActiveSync in Open-Xchange. This allows it to communicate with most ActiveSync enabled devices, such as Nokia S60, Apple iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. With a 3rd party ActiveSync-client, the add-on can also work with Android 1.5 and BlackBerry devices.
Like most ActiveSync solutions, this add-on allows you to synchronize your calendar and contacts (private and global) as well as to push email to your device.
In the press release, Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange stated that while “[m]ost current solutions are limited either to specific smartphones or require costly proprietary server solutions, the OXtender for Business Mobility provides users with easy-to-use mobile messaging and collaboration capabilities on all the devices they use — anywhere, anytime, at a reasonable cost.”
While that is a valid point, the new add-on simply enables ActiveSync for Open-Xchange. There are other collaboration softwares which also support ActiveSync (such as Zimbra, and not to forget Microsoft Exchange). The fact that you can use a 3rd party application to synchronize your Android or BlackBerry with ActiveSync is a completely different thing and has nothing to do with this add-on.
The new add-on will be priced at $355.00 for 25 users, and $14.22 for additional users.
