Open-Xchange Inc. today 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 (www.open-xchange.com/EN/product/evaluation.html) 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 Inc. is the leading 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.

"This announcement addresses three major industry trends -- organizations' focus on cost reduction strategies; organizations' need to find measurable value for IT investments in a very short order; and organizations' need to allow their staff members to collaborate with one another from wherever they are, using whatever network enabled device they choose," said Dan Kusnetzky, Executive Vice President, Marketing Strategy for Open-Xchange. "Customers deploying open source software in a virtual machine can reduce their software and hardware costs, and simultaneously enhance their agility in addressing future computing needs."

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.

Quoting from chron.com