Solutions · Developers and integrators
Open source, open standards,
and an API for everything else.
Office Unbound is being built from established open-source projects joined by its own identity, administration, provisioning and migration services. This page is for people who want to integrate with it, extend it or help build it.
Project status The public source repository has not been published yet. Developers who register interest will be told when it is, and when contribution guidelines are available.
What is being built, and by whom
Most of the functionality in Office Unbound already exists as mature open-source software: mail servers, office editors, file platforms, Matrix homeservers, media servers, identity providers. Rewriting any of it would be a poor use of effort. The project’s own code is the layer those projects do not provide — a unified interface, one identity and administration model across services, multi-tenant provisioning, a management API, migration tooling and a branded desktop client.
That shapes how developers can take part. Some work belongs upstream: a bug in a mail server or document editor is best fixed in that project, where every user of it benefits. Some belongs in Office Unbound’s own services. Much of the most useful work early on is neither code nor upstream — it is testing protocol compatibility, reviewing designs and writing documentation.
Standards the platform is designed around
Open protocols are what let existing clients connect, let data leave in usable form, and let integrations avoid depending on Office Unbound’s own interfaces. Which standards are supported in practice depends on the components finally selected, so every row is a design target that is Under evaluation
| Area | Standards | What they make possible |
|---|---|---|
| SMTP, IMAP, JMAP | Standard mail clients and libraries; JMAP where the selected server supports it. | |
| Calendars and contacts | CalDAV, CardDAV, iCalendar, vCard | Calendar and address book sync with existing clients; invitations across platforms. |
| Exchange protocols | MAPI over HTTP, EWS, ActiveSync | Outlook and mobile clients, if the selected mail server implements them well enough. |
| Files | WebDAV | File access from operating systems and tools without a dedicated client. |
| Documents | OpenDocument, Office Open XML, WOPI | Open file formats, plus the interface that connects document editors to file storage. |
| Identity | OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, LDAP | Single sign-on for your own applications and federation with existing identity providers. |
| Chat | Matrix | Bots, bridges and clients built against the open Matrix client-server API. |
| Meetings and calling | WebRTC, SIP | Browser-based media; softphones, desk phones and carrier connections. |
Component candidates and their licenses are listed on the technology page. Project sites: Keycloak, grommunio, Stalwart, Nextcloud, Matrix, LiveKit.
The management API
Planned. Not yet specified in detail.
Standard protocols cover the data in each service. They do not cover administration: creating an organization, adding a user to every service at once, applying a policy, reading service health. That is what Office Unbound’s own management API is for. It is intended to be the same interface the administration console uses, so that anything an administrator can do by hand can be automated, and so that integrations do not depend on undocumented internals.
- Tenants and organizations
- Create and configure customer tenants, domains, service plans and quotas. Planned
- Users and groups
- Lifecycle operations — onboarding, changes, offboarding — and group membership across services. Planned
- Policies
- Authentication, sharing and retention policies at organization and group level. Planned
- Health and reporting
- Service health, usage and audit records for monitoring and reporting systems. Planned
- Migration
- Assessment and migration project status, for tracking in external systems. Planned
Design goals include scoped credentials — an API key limited to particular tenants and operations — auditing of every API call, and published documentation. The first planned consumer is the clientst0r MSP platform; the API is intended for any integrator.
Ways to take part
Contribution guidelines, a code of conduct and the repository will be published together. Until then, registering interest is the way in.
Code
Office Unbound’s own services — administration, provisioning, migration connectors, the desktop client — once the repository is public.
Design review
Architecture, API and security design documents are most useful to review before they are implemented, which is now.
Compatibility testing
Testing mail, calendar and document clients against candidate components, and reporting where they fall short.
Documentation
Deployment, administration and operations guides, written for people who will actually run the platform.
Packaging
Reproducible deployment on the initial Proxmox VE target and Linux distributions.
Upstream work
Fixes and features in the open-source projects Office Unbound depends on, contributed to those projects directly.
Extending the platform
Extensibility is planned at several levels. The most stable are the open standards above and the management API: integrations built on those should not break when internals change. The underlying components also have their own extension mechanisms — Nextcloud apps, Matrix bots and bridges, mail filtering rules — and the project will document which of them are supported within an Office Unbound deployment and which may conflict with its management layer.
A formal extension or plugin model for Office Unbound’s own interface has not been designed. It will not be promised until it has.
Reporting security issues
A security disclosure process — how to report a vulnerability privately, how reports are acknowledged and handled, and how advisories are published — will be published with the repository. Until then there is no code to report against.
If you find a security problem with this website in the meantime, use the contact form and say it is a security report.
Licensing
The license for Office Unbound’s own code has not been selected. The components it builds on carry their own licenses, which differ — some copyleft, some with commercial editions or branding terms — and are being reviewed before any is adopted. Contributors will know the license, and any contributor agreement, before they are asked to contribute.
There is no public repository, issue tracker, API reference or SDK today, and no GitHub organization should be assumed to be Office Unbound’s unless it is linked from this site. Registered developers will be told when the repository is published.
Want to build on or contribute to Office Unbound?
Tell us what you would like to work on — code, review, testing, documentation or packaging — and we will contact you when the repository and contribution guidelines are published.