Hula (software)

Infobox Software
name = Hula



caption = Hula's webmail interface
developer = Novell (NetMail code base) / Hula community
operating_system = Linux
genre = Webmail Mail server Electronic calendar
license = GPL
website = [http://www.hula-project.org hula-project.org]

Hula was an open source mail and calendar project based on open standards announced on February 15 2005 by Novell.

It is derived from an existing product by the same software house, called NetMail, and retains many of the architectural features of that software. However, important components such as the mail store are being re-developed to integrate new functionality (such as search) and new features (such as calendaring, using the calendar server protocol CalDAV). As such, when complete it will be a more modern system with better support for common standards in comparison to the earlier NetMail product.

Hula aims to expand in three main directions:
#a calendaring tool
#a web-based rich mail client
#and a search facility for all mail and calendar information within the server.

It comes with a web-based client to access information, but desktop applications are readily supported. Novell Evolution released with Hula support in version 2.6, and other clients are expected to support Hula closer to Hula's release.

Hula is an open-source effort sponsored by Novell and developed by Dave Camp and Joe Gasiorek, amongst others. On November 28th, 2006 Novell announced that it would no longer have anyone work on it full time. [cite web | author=Teichman, Peter | year=2006 | title=Hula Status | work=forge.novell.com | url=http://forge.novell.com/pipermail/hula-general/2006-November/002084.html | accessmonthday=November 28 |accessyear=2006] On January 30, 2007, The Messaging Architects announced an agreement to acquire NetMail and take over leadership of the open source Hula Project from Novell. Currently due to the move of Hula from Novell to The Messaging Architects the project's web site just contains an announcement of the transfer rather than the project. With the future of Hula unclear to many, a software fork of the source code was used to create the independent Bongo Project.

ee also

* Collaborative software
* Ximian
* List of personal information managers

Compare to

* @Mail
* Citadel
* exchange4linux
* Kerio MailServer
* Kolab
* Merak Mail Server
* Scalix
* [http://www.zarafa.com Zarafa]
* Zimbra

References

External links

* [http://hula-project.org/ Official site] defunct as of 2008-03-16
* [http://nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005 Announcement in Nat Friedman's blog]
* [http://www.linuxedge.org/node/82 Preview of Hula with screenshots of new Dragonfly interface]
* [http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/11/28/1958210.shtml Novell Dumps the Hula Project (SlashDot.org)]