The Hula Project is an open source calendar and email server that might one day make your life as an IT person very comfortable. It scales well and it has the necessary components for a small/medium sized business, but is it ready to replace your old Exchange box?

The short answer: No.
The project is still in a development stage and isn’t going to replace your exchange box unless you have an emergency situation and need a mail server quick. The software is somewhat buggy and certain things (like a global address book) aren’t implemented yet.

The long answer: Maybe.
The Hula project has the beginnings of everything most small to medium sized businesses need in an email/calendar server. Or at least it has a placemarker for them. Some of the services Hula aims to provide are not done and so you will run into certain instances where functionality you thought was there really isn’t yet.

The server itself is very easy to set up, especially if you are running a variety of Debian with apt-get. The online help on their website is very helpful in getting things setup and you can be sending emails and setting up meetings in no time.

The sections of the administrative page that are complete are easy to use and you shouldn’t have any problem navigating and setting up new users, groups, mailing lists, etc. The help links that show up are very informative and the documentation is well written, but these links do not show up on every page yet.

There is a handy “Tasks” section to the administration page that seems to be the start of a “wizard” type interface that allows you to do things without too much navigation or searching.

The webmail portion that the users might see (if they aren’t using another client) is mostly complete. There are a few rough edges, but most users of any kind of webmail will feel right at home. The calendar works well and the address book works like you would expect. Nothing fancy, like Gmail’s AJAX interface, but it works as well as if not better than the Exchange 2003 web interface.

User Problems (these are for the webmail client, so if you aren’t using it then these will not effect you):

• In the calendar when you click on a day it takes you to that day, but if you then try to add an appointment or event the program always defaults to today’s date. So adding future appointments gets annoying. This is probably just an oversight and I’m sure it will be fixed as soon as someone notices it.
• Currently the tasks show up on the calendar when they were received, instead of when the start or end date is.
• It would be nice to be able to hover your mouse over appointments and events in the calendar and get a full description.
• Instead of having a full month view, it would be nice to have a “last week and three weeks out” view which would always show last week’s schedule and the outlook for the next three weeks. Most calendar programs fail on this aspect, so I can’t claim this as a downside but it would be nice if Hula would put something like this in there. The problem is that when you get to the end of the month you have to switch to the next month to see what you have going on, even if it is just tomorrow.
• The user’s session times out after an insanely small amount of time (like 10 minutes). They then have to log back in again. This can be changed in the admin program, but it looks like you would have to change it on every user as there doesn’t appear to be a global setting.
  v407 Note:There is now a global setting located at Internet Services->Server Messaging Server->Connection Manager->User Module

The administrative page we had a few more problems with. This is where you can really tell that this project isn’t quite finished. We ran into several problems, including sections that just didn’t work and portions that didn’t appear to save when trying to update them.

Admin Problems:

• Clicking on certain links seems to log you out of the system. This doesn’t appear to be a session timeout because you can log right back in and try the link again and it replicates. And, no, I’m not clicking on the logout button.
• Currently in the version we tested there is no working LDAP server, which means no “global address book” unless you use an external LDAP server. Granted, this is probably pretty easy to setup, but it would be nice to have it working out of the box (or .deb as the case may be).
• I could not get the “out of office reply” to work at all. I’m guessing this is because the Proxy Agent isn’t completely functional, which is why this is listed as an Admin problem and not a user problem.
• Help Links are not available on some pages where we could have used them.
• We couldn’t get SpamAssassin to work with Hula, but this was because our tested version wasn’t the latest and greatest.

Overall, for this early of a release, the Hula Project is looking great. We are hoping that the Ubuntu repositories get updated with a newer release soon so we can try it out and see what has been fixed.