Frequently Asked Questions for ISPs and web hosting companies

1. What is Open-Xchange Hosting Edition
Open-Xchange Hosting Edition delivers Smart Collaboration™ that simplifies everyday life, work and social interactions. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition is based on AJAX and offers email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and knowledge management. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition offers open APIs and standards to integrate existing service and billing infrastructures. The system can be scaled horizontally and vertically to serve millions of groupware users on a shared hosting environment: either by upgrading the power of existing hardware or adding new servers to distribution the application load. Open-Xchange Hosting Edition features intelligent tools for server administration and monitoring, load balancing, clustering and scalability.


2. What is the relationship between 1&1 and Open-Xchange?
Open-Xchange and 1&1 have signed a non-exclusive partnership to provide hosted email and collaboration packages based on Open-Xchange’s Smart Collaboration technology. Open-Xchange is the first open source collaboration solution that is available for a broader audience as hosted solution. Compared with Hosted Microsoft Exchange®, we deliver significant more functionality at a disruptive price. Open-Xchange is in discussions to offer Open-Xchange based collaboration solutions with other web hosting companies and ISPs.


3. What license does Open-Xchange use?
Open-Xchange Server is licensed under the General Public License for the server software or “serverpack” and the Creative Commons, Attribution, Noncommercial, ShareAlike or CC:by-nc-sa (“Creative Commons”) for the digital content and JAVA script code used by the browser or the “webpack”.   The OXtender for Microsoft Outlook is based on a proprietary end-user license agreement (“EULA”).  The Open-Xchange webpack and OXtenders can only be offered as a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) if you entered into a SaaS Amendment to the Creative Commons license and EULA with Open-Xchange Inc.


3. What services does Open-Xchange offer to ISPs and web hosting companies?
Open-Xchange delivers enterprise level support and guides you through the entire project from concept phase, planning to development and implementation. Open-Xchange provides you with level 3 support, intelligent tools for authentification, session monitoring, reporting and guarantees long-term maintenance for all relevant APIs and tools.


4. What is the difference between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting?
Shared hosting requires full support of multi-tenant/domain capabilities. One instance of the application serves a large number of customers. Each customer can work in his own environment within this instance – completely separated from each other customer. A dedicated server offers a complete instance for a single customer by separating each instance using for example virtualization technologies. Dedicated servers are mostly used for larger companies. Dedicated server offerings of Open-Xchange Server are already in place. Please contact us to obtain further details and references.


5. What is the price of Open-Xchange Server for ISPs and web hosting companies? One of the largest obstacles web hosting companies face when providing groupware is price. High costs make it impossible to offer groupware as part of any basic web hosting package. This leaves the majority of business users with POP or IMAP mail. Pricing of Open-Xchange fits into web hosting company’s basic pricing structure giving all user access to groupware.  Additionally, with the AJAX groupware solution as a foundation, add-on solutions and up-sell services related to ‘rich client’ extensions, personal digital assistant connectors and added data storage can be offered as well.

For further details, please take the chance and contact Open-Xchange Hosting Sales.