openSUSE & grommunio - The Exchange alternative (osc26)

As organizations look for practical ways to regain control over their collaboration infrastructure, open source becomes more than an alternative — it becomes a foundation and requirement for digital sovereignty. This talk presents grommunio as an open, enterprise-grade alternative to Microsoft Exchange, with a strong focus on the technology behind making it usable out of the box. The session will show how grommunio builds on the openSUSE ecosystem to deliver a complete collaboration appliance based on openSUSE 16.0, using KIWI to create a reproducible, maintainable, and deployable system image. Rather than only discussing groupware features, this talk goes behind the scenes: how the appliance is assembled, how openSUSE provides the operating system foundation, and how grommunio packages email, calendaring, contacts, mobile synchronization, Evolution/Thunderbird/Outlook compatibility, and administration into an integrated enterprise experience. A key focus is the out-of-the-box experience: turning a powerful open source software stack into a product that can be installed, configured, and operated by real organizations. The talk highlights how openSUSE technologies enable a reliable appliance model, how grommunio delivers enterprise collaboration on top of it, and why this matters for organizations that want to reduce vendor lock-in without compromising usability or professional requirements. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://c3voc.de