The Open-Xchange Hosting Edition is the only Linux-based, open source groupware solution designed specifically to meet the needs of hosting providers. OX Hosting Edition has been architected to integrate into a hosting provider’s existing infrastructure such as authentication, provisioning, billing, and email storage rather than require that these systems be replaced. OX Hosting Edition features a rich AJAX client supported by the leading web browsers. Through the web interface or through collaborative ‘rich clients’ such as Microsoft Outlook, users have access to email, calendars, contacts, documents, tasks and more. The Open-Xchange solution becomes truly collaborative when user share and publish their groupware objects for others to view and edit. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition Server provides full access control for users to decide which users and groups have rights to access items they have created.  Other advanced features such as tagging, linking and ‘server push’ provide for a robust, cutting-edge solution for end users.

Collaboration
The design goals of OX Hosting Edition is to simplify day-to-day work, while offering more functionality in a single application than users expect. The collaboration suite features email, calendar, contacts, tasks, bookmarks, knowledge base articles and shared documents. Within a customer’s environment, users can chose to keep groupware items private, share them with specific individuals or make them public. This makes functions such as document sharing among a group or company-wide vacation calendars possible.  All of this functionality is delivered via an AJAX user interface. AJAX allows items on the screen to update automatically and data to be fetched in real time avoiding the typical click-and-wait associated with most internet applications. 

Users who prefer to use Microsoft Outlook or other ‘rich clients’ can continue to do so. Within Microsoft Outlook users can sync their email, calendars, contacts and tasks allowing for full access to all groupware functions.