----- Original Message -----
From: "Johnny Hughes" johnny@centos.org To: centos@centos.org Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2018 8:18:18 AM Subject: Re: [CentOS] Which is better? Microsoft Exchange 2016 or Linux-based SMTP Servers?
On 07/19/2018 03:18 PM, David C. Miller wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Keller" kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us To: centos@centos.org Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2018 11:33:17 AM Subject: Re: [CentOS] Which is better? Microsoft Exchange 2016 or Linux-based SMTP Servers?
On 2018-07-19, Mark Rousell mark.rousell@signal100.com wrote:
Well said. I feel that too many people today have forgotten (or, more likely, never learned) these lessons from history. People give away their personal and supposedly private information too easily and, I feel certain, will come to regret it (some already have come to regret it).
While I agree with the above, it doesn't really address Johnny's question, which is which open source calendaring projects can compete with Google calendar for users' ease of use? If I give my users Zimbra, and they hate it, then what? For simple email use, there are plenty of clients which can talk IMAP/SMTP to a linux server, but the options for calendaring (and ''groupware'' in general) are much sparser.
It's a hard question, and each organization needs to weigh their privacy concerns against their users' requirements.
--keith
-- kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
Zimbra's calendaring component is also a CALDav compliant server. Users can also share their calendars either via the zimbra web client(public, or restricted to an email address with a password), or exporting the calendar to an ICS file. CALDav compliant calendar clients like Apples calendar app on Mac and iOS can subscribe or connect to the zimbra server using its https://zimbra.example.com address. The Zimbra web client interface for using and managing calendars is just as easy to use as googles calendars.
OK, what you say is true in theory. However, in Thunderbird on Linux and using Mac clients, etc .. and certainly on Windows workstation clients using outlook .. zimbra does not work well. It also does not work well on people's smart phone calendars. People want their phone to remind them of their appointments .. any solution that is iffy doing that is just unacceptable in this day and age.
Yeah, I'm not saying it is perfect, nothing is. Zimbra standard also includes active sync so your iOS and android device can connect to it like if it was an exchange server. I have dozens of users doing that and the calendars work as intended. I also have a few dozen users connecting to our zimbra server via the Apple calendar program via CALDav protocol and although Apples program is not 100% CALDav compliant it works fine for the things people actually use. They send invites and get reminders for events just fine. For our outlook users there is a connector that allows outlook to connect to our zimbra server as if it were an exchange server. I wasn't aware that thundebird had a calendar component but it works fine for IMAP and POP. I'm not saying it is perfect but if you have a mix of platforms like I do(Windows, Mac, Linux, android, iOS) and have to host the data yourself, I think Zimbra is a decent solution. That being said, I would prefer to use googles offerings. It would make my job a lot easier. Being an email admin, dealing with spam/phishing/malware, maintaining security patches, OS updates, and hardware sucks.