Open-Xchange, the independent open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a new member.

"Open-Xchange is the only independent, open source collaboration software project and product and as such, we are committed to embracing a fully open development framework for that is cross platform and that embraces industry standards," said Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange. "Today, we are inviting the Eclipse community to fully participate in the evolution of our open communication platform and by doing so, offering contributors and industry partners long-term security to continue independent development."

Open-Xchange offers email, calendar, contacts, tasks and document sharing providing companies with all the tools needed to facilitate communication and efficient teamwork. Users improve their communication and teamwork with intuitive tools and intelligent features, such as smart links between calendar appointments, task lists, contacts, documents, bookmarks and knowledge articles.

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform that helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.

"Whenever members launch new innovative technology, it helps us generate more interest in Eclipse. We are pleased to welcome Open-Xchange as a member of the Eclipse Foundation and welcome their expertise," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "We look forward to Open-Xchange's participation in the rapidly growing ecosystem at Eclipse."

Open-Xchange provides highly scalable collaboration server components, installation and administration tools based on Eclipse.org Equinox, optimized for ISPs, hosters and telcos. Open-Xchange server with its fault tolerant design, self healing abilities and disruption of service free scalability and maintenance features is ideally suited for large scale deployments for millions of users. Based on these capabilities, Open-Xchange enables hosted groupware functionality with enhanced capabilities at a fraction of the cost of competing products. Open-Xchange's AJAX frontend enables access to all capabilities of Open-Xchange Server in SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings without requiring any local installation or maintenance. All components of Open-Xchange are available as open source.

For more information on Open-Xchange contact Joseph Eckert Jeckert@bakercg.com at Baker Communication Group.