Red Hat's Fedora 11 to offer interop with Microsoft Exchange

Red Hat is not going to let the Microsoft-Novell partnership dim its own prospects for interoperability.

That seems to be the case with the Red Hat-sponsored open source Fedora project, which plans to release on June 9 a major upgrade of its free Linux that offers robust integration with Microsoft Exchange via a new feature called OpenChange. 

According to a blog posted about the upcoming Fedora 11 release, code named "Leonidas," OpenChange is the first open source implementation of Microsoft's ubiquitous Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI).  The interoperability with Exchange is also enbaled by incorporation of some portions of the next generation Samba 4 platform. 

It's a pretty big deal, and here's why:

"The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients to offer native compatibility with Exchange," according to a Red Hat blog recently posted on the company web site. "Using the “libmapi” library, OpenChange allows clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, and other open source applications to utilize the full range of MAPI functionality including messaging, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks."

Fedora 11 offers a host of other new significant features including support for the Ext4 file system by default.  To see complete list, go to fedoraproject.org.