Liaison™ - Semantic Messaging, Email & Collaboration Client for GroupWise

Originally released in March 2005, and previously called 'MozNGW' - Liaison™ is a cross platform collaboration client that integrates with Novell's email and collaboration product called GroupWise.

Web 3.0 - Semantic Collaboration

Liaison was, and still is one of the first true Semantic Web 3.0 collaboration clients.

The Future of Collaboration

The Technology

Liaison is written using our own cross platform .NET framework XULU and the Mozilla projects' cross platform toolkit - XULRunner, the same platform that they use to build their cross platform web browser - Mozilla Firefox. We in turn have used it to create our cross platform email & collaboration client with GroupWise integration.

Liaison itself is entirely based on W3C Web standards, there is absolutely no java, and all the key components are written in XML and Javascript, visually styled with CSS, the icons and images all in PNG or SVG format. All transactions with the GroupWise Post Office occur over HTTP/S SOAP connections, data is manipulated in the client as XML/RDF and queried with SPARQL.

Liaison is a traditional "thick" client not a web client, as a consequence, it has access to all the features (and data) you would expect in any advanced web browser - web pages, native audio and video support, RSS feeds, bookmarks - even geo-location based services. As if all of that wasn't impressive enough, it runs identically on any platform that Mozilla Firefox runs on, uses exactly the same extension and theme format that Firefox uses and it is currently less than 500Kb (Yes Kilobytes!).

Although it is not licensed under the GPL, it is and will remain entirely free for non-commercial/non-profit use - this includes any not for profit educational and goverment institutions.

Liaison™ - previously Mozilla for GroupWise

When this project was originally conceived it was called 'Mozilla for GroupWise' or MozNGW for short. Due to the unfortunate choice to use two copyrighted names, and the decision to not keep 'MozNGW' a Groupwise only solution, it was decided to rename it to 'Liaison Groupware'.

The major difference between Liaison and MozNGW was that Liaison no longer used the GroupWise web access components but the GroupWise SOAP interface. GroupWise web access was never designed to do what what we did with it, and by moving to pure XML interfaces we could support not only different mail platforms, but other abstract data streams as well.

In fact, Microsoft Exchange 2010 itself exposes comprehensive web services, because of this Liaison can simultaniously consume and mashup Exchange resourses as easily as GroupWise ones!

Liaison™ v1.0

Due to the major code changes in both Liason and Mozilla, the original Liaison version is no longer available to download as this was based on a much earlier Firefox codebase. Liaison v1.0 is based on the Mozilla 1.9.1/Firefox 3.6 codebase, and available as a standalone application.

Liaison v1.0 was scheduled for release last year, with support for GroupWise 8. Unfortunately, we discovered Mozilla had dropped native SOAP support in Firefox 3, requiring the creation of our own SOAP/WSDL libraries that to replace them. This process is underway, and we are expecting to have the new SOAP support completed soon. has now been completed as part of our XULU project.

Thanks to our XULU Project, we also now have cross platform XML backed SQLite datastores (via ADO.NET) amongst others things, and are now able to exceed our original proposal document we wrote way back in 2002!

Release Date?

We are currently aiming for a beta release during April/May 2010.