Open-Xchange Integrates Facebook, Twitter With E-mail Inbox

Open-source collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to open its e-mail inbox to messages from social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Open-Xchange wants to simplify dealing with multiple modes of communication by making them all accessible in its e-mail client, said Rafael Laguna, the company's CEO. It plans to offer that functionality in a February software release. Users will be able to automatically filter messages so that the ones from web-based e-mail services and social networking sites, for example, go into a personal inbox.

Version 6.14 of Open-Xchange, launched Tuesday, lets users bring in contact data from social networking sites and web-based email services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, Laguna said. It can also bring in messages from Gmail. Integration with Google's calendar service is on the way, he said. Users can either have separate address books for different sites or a unified one with all their contact information.

Open-Xchange has improved the user interface for the team calendar view in version 6.14. Users can now see what their co-workers are up to from hourly to monthly views and zoom between the two. Previous versions have only had static daily or weekly views. When the grid is large a hover window can give a more detailed view, according to Laguna.

During the first year Open-Xchange Server Edition costs US$1,312.50 for 25 named users and a one-year maintenance subscription. Additional users are $ 52.50 each. Renewing the maintenance subscription for another year costs $328 and $13, according to Open-Xchange's price list. The pricing applies worldwide and the software is available globally.