Success Story: OpenXPort – A data portability API for groupware systems using the open standard JMAP
by OpenXPort team
The Challenge
Hundreds of millions of users worldwide store their PIM data such as contacts, appointments, tasks, notes, or files on internet services. This is true not only for email or groupware messaging services, but also for Social Networks, CRM systems, … and many other applications.
So, what happens to this data when a user decides to change his provider?
Many of the most popular Webmail systems have no well-defined APIs and/or data portability support. Thus, millions of email users are involuntary “locked-in” with a service provider.
The OpenXPort project helps establishing new standards that simplify the transfer of PIM data.
The Solution
The OpenXPort project works on open data formats and protocols to improve data portability for groupware/PIM data such as contacts calendars, tasks, notes, and files. The project makes use of audriga’s comprehensive experience in the field of data portability. Audriga provides self-service data portability tooling for many hosting companies worldwide, and assists organizations and ISPs to switch complete messaging or online storage platforms to other solutions.
Although important standards like vCard/CardDAV and iCalendar/CalDAV do exist, they have limited use when it comes to data portability as they do not cover all types of data, use complex protocols and lack consistency. For this reason, OpenXPort builds on the JMAP family of standards which have been developed within IETF. JMAP is beginning to replace IMAP (email protocol) and is currently being extended to cover contacts, calendars, and tasks. OpenXPort is engaged in the ongoing standardization and extends Open Source servers with JMAP functionalities.
OpenXPort’s JMAP plugins for Roundcube, SqirrelMail, and Horde can already help many of its users to exercise their right to free data portability. They also provide reusable code and blueprints for adding JMAP support to other systems.
Besides simplifying the import and export of data, OpenXPort will also improve the overall interoperability between...