Hards said the bad news is some of OpenChange is "pretty ugly" and that is expected as "some of what it's describing is ugly".

"It was originally done off wire catches, but now we almost always code off documentation," he said. "Some stuff is ugly to deal with, but we do it. I would not be doing demos that showed real implementations without documentation."

Hards demonstrated message and groupware information transfer between Windows and Linux virtual machines on his notebook using the OpenChange command line tools.

"We will try to back it onto a database like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle," he said. "A lot of the [Exchange] operations are asking for database operations. The conceptual stuff says 'table and row'."

"Once you have a set of bindings and client libraries it doesn't just have to sit on the desktop. It could be mobile. Task creation and a whole stack of interesting integration can happen when you get to this level. It will look like Outlook except work better."