Liaison™ - Cross Platform Client for GroupWise
Previously called 'MozNGW' - Liaison™ is a cross platform client for Novell's email and collaboration server - GroupWise, written using the Mozilla project's cross platform toolkit. In the same way that Mozilla have used it to create Mozilla Firefox their cross platform web browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird, their cross platform email client, we have used it to create a cross platform client for GroupWise.
This client is entirely based on W3C Web standards. There is absolutely no java, and all the key components are written in XML and Javascript. The actual interface components are all CSS, the icons and images all PNG's. All transactions with the GroupWise Post Office occur over HTTP/S connections, and metadata is stream back to the client in XML-RDF, yet despite all this Liaison is still a traditional "thick" client not a web client. As if all that wasn't impressive enough, it runs identically on any platform that Mozilla Firefox runs on - currently Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, it is currently less than 250Kb (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 use of two copyrighted names, and the decision to not keep 'MozNGW' a Groupwise only solution, it was decided to rename it to 'Liaison Groupware'. Liaison is in a transition phase from the original 'MozNGW' concept and codebase to the newer 'Liaison' codebase, so you will see the two terms being used interchangeably for a while.
That which we call a rose
We do appear have caused some confusion with this name change, and given the impression that Liaison and MozNGW are different products. Let us be quite clear they are currently one and the same thing - this is a name change first and a code change second.
The key difference between Liaison and MozNGW is that Liaison no longer uses the GroupWise web access components but the GroupWise SOAP interface. This is for two reasons.
- GroupWise web access was never designed to do what what we do with it, and MozNGW/Liaison is greatly limited by it.
- By moving to SOAP and XML-RPC interfaces we can support not only different mail platforms, but other data streams as well.
Liaison™ v1.0
Due to the major code changes in both Liason and Mozilla, the Liaison™ Alpha 3 version is no longer available to download as this was based on the Firefox 1.0 codebase, Liaison™ v1.0 is based on the Mozilla 1.9/Firefox 3.0 codebase, and is available as a standalone application.
Liaison™ v1.0 was scheduled for release in March 2008 during Novell's Brainshare conference, with support for GroupWise 7 and the next GroupWise version codenamed "Bonsai". Unfortunately, we discovered Mozilla have dropped native SOAP support in Firefox 3 (See: SOAP in Gecko-based Browsers ), neccesitating the creation of our own SOAP libraries that can run in Firefox 3. This process is underway, and we are expecting to have the new SOAP support completed by the end of May 2008, and a formal release about 1 month later.
