Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 14:56 -0500, Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
---- horde/imp/kronolith/turba/etc.
I think it's even packaged in CentOS Plus
Craig
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
I've been evaluating some packages for my employer the last few months. The two products I have narrowed it down to my needs are eGroupware and Zimbra.
So far, I'm leaning towards Zimbra, because it seems to offer a nice e-mail system with an easy to use interface for users. There is a community edition and a commercial edition.
http://www.zimbra.com/community/downloads.html
I too am currently using Postfix and Squirrelmail, and would like to keep using Postfix as the primary transport system. There is a way to configure Zimbra to act as a secondary system forwarding mail to Postfix, but I can't find the link right now.
There are also methods to migrate to Zimbra from Squirrelmail using some imapsync scripts to migrate the mailboxes.
By itself though, it seems to have a nice and powerful mail system with all the features of anti-virus, spam, etc.
eGroupware works great too, so make sure you check it out, but I'm thinking of leaning towards Zimbra for my needs.
Check them out.
Regards, Max
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Bo Lynch Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 2:56 PM To: centos@centos.org Subject: [CentOS] Email/GroupWare Suite
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
It depends on what features you are looking to give your users, but you may want to look at Zimbra (Zimbra.com). They have a free version and paid versions. Nice web interface, sharing of address books, calendars, and documents, etc.
Please report back your findings as it may be helpful to others.
Andrew
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely handle all that you may want to throw at it. It does have some draw backs - what doesn't? IBM / Lotus can give your people a great deal of support while they get their legs underneath them. I'm not going to swear to it, but I think they can extend some pretty good terms to public schools. There are all kinds of specialized add-ons as well. Development tools are pretty robust as well.
Ed Westphal
On Wed, January 7, 2009 3:23 pm, Ed Westphal wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely handle all that you may want to throw at it. It does have some draw backs - what doesn't? IBM / Lotus can give your people a great deal of support while they get their legs underneath them. I'm not going to swear to it, but I think they can extend some pretty good terms to public schools. There are all kinds of specialized add-ons as well. Development tools are pretty robust as well.
Ed Westphal _______________________________________________
Has anyone used PHPGroupware? I've been looking at some comparisons with this and it looks like it has alot of features.
Bo Lynch
on 1-7-2009 12:15 PM Bo Lynch spake the following:
On Wed, January 7, 2009 3:23 pm, Ed Westphal wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely handle all that you may want to throw at it. It does have some draw backs - what doesn't? IBM / Lotus can give your people a great deal of support while they get their legs underneath them. I'm not going to swear to it, but I think they can extend some pretty good terms to public schools. There are all kinds of specialized add-ons as well. Development tools are pretty robust as well.
Ed Westphal _______________________________________________
Has anyone used PHPGroupware? I've been looking at some comparisons with this and it looks like it has alot of features.
Bo Lynch
I think PHPgroupware is sort of stale, and EGroupware is a fork that just made a release in November or December.
I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely
Has anyone used PHPGroupware? I've been looking at some comparisons with this and it looks like it has alot of features. Bo Lynch
I think PHPgroupware is sort of stale, and EGroupware is a fork that just made a release in November or December.
We looked at PHPgroupware a long time ago (2003?) and it did have allot of features but not a very strong core and some parts of it seemed unfinished. We also were considering throwing in the Open Source towel on groupware and going with Notes. Fortunately that was the moment that OpenGroupware was released as Open Source, we've been using that ever since and are very happy. It is fast, minimal requirements, uses Cyrus as the mail store (*very* hast and feature-ful), and has a solid set of core features. The WebUI certainly isn't the sexiest but it is robust and has a great XML-RPC API.
But if I was going to go with a paid solution I'd go with Notes over the other commercial offerings.
On Wed, January 7, 2009 3:23 pm, Ed Westphal wrote:
I may start a war here, but I'm going to recommend Lotus Notes / Domino as the collaborative software for you. I've had quite a bit of experience with it in a large multi-national company. It can definitely handle all that you may want to throw at it. It does have some draw backs - what doesn't? IBM / Lotus can give your people a great deal of support while they get their legs underneath them. I'm not going to swear to it, but I think they can extend some pretty good terms to public schools. There are all kinds of specialized add-ons as well. Development tools are pretty robust as well.
Ed Westphal _______________________________________________
If you want to see how far you can go with Open Source, you may have a look at what HEC (Hautes Études Commerciales) did here in Montreal:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7323 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7524
If you want paid software, then you may have a look at Communigate Pro which i use at a client's site. It's not too expansive, can easily do clustering, runs on many OSes (I run it on CentOS 5), has a MAPI plugin for Outlook, includes a SIP server, etc.
I have 50 users with about 100 Gigs of mailboxes / Public folders and uses standards mbox / mdir as storage, doesn't need SQL, has a good WEB interface, etc. I run data storage off 4 x Seagate SAS 15K 73 Gigs and it screams (Adaptec 3405)! No %iowait at all. The system runs on a Dual Core Opteron 2214 with 4 Gigs RAM (Tyan Transport TA-26 (B3992-E)). It does many other tasks (Corporate FTP, Licence management server, SSH Gateway for road warriors, RSync Backup server for Winblows file servers, etc) and easily copes with the load.
Backups $ restore are very easy. Upgrade and migration to another server is a breeze. All is contained in one directory.
I'm in no way associated with Communigate or Tyan, it was just to share my experience.
Bo Lynch schrieb am 07.01.2009 20:56:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Greets René -- GEEKCODE: GIT$ d- s+: a- C+++ UL++++$ P+ L++ E--- W+++ N+ !o K- w+ O- M-- V- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t++ 5++ X+ R tv+ b DI D++ G e+ h--- r++ y+++ PGP-Key and more available at http://www.standfest.net My Blog is at http://www.gaudidiecher.de
René Standfest wrote:
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Thank you for mentioning sogo. I took a look at this project today, and will be adding it to the list of packages I'm testing. When researching groupware packages before, this project didn't turn up, but am glad you brought it up here. It looks promising and worth a look!
Regards, Max
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Max Hetrick maxhetrick@verizon.net wrote:
René Standfest wrote:
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Thank you for mentioning sogo. I took a look at this project today, and will be adding it to the list of packages I'm testing. When researching groupware packages before, this project didn't turn up, but am glad you brought it up here. It looks promising and worth a look!
I opted for Kolab http://www.kolab.org/ over Zimbra. You can have unlimited users in Kolab. My users wanted to use outlook as the client - Zimbra charges quite a bit for that feature. With Kolab you buy a $10 outlook connector for each computer. Most other mail clients are free to use with Kolab.
No package for cent but that is a good thing. It compiles everything it needs using openpkg. I have installed it on cent several times while testing. Just about to take my first installation live.
-bazooka
René Standfest wrote:
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Slightly OT, but just wondering if you are planning on running openLDAP on the SOGo Opengroupware installation, or whether or not you have an external LDAP server (CentOS DS or RHEL DS) that you are planning on using?
Any experiences or gotchas that you have already encountered that might be useful?
My company is planning on implementing either FDS or CentOS DS as an LDAP server, and I read the docs for SOGo, and they are using openLDAP on the same machine.
Regards, Max
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Slightly OT, but just wondering if you are planning on running openLDAP on the SOGo Opengroupware installation, or whether or not you have an external LDAP server (CentOS DS or RHEL DS) that you are planning on using? Any experiences or gotchas that you have already encountered that might be useful? My company is planning on implementing either FDS or CentOS DS as an LDAP server, and I read the docs for SOGo, and they are using openLDAP on the same machine.
I develop on OpenGroupware, not SOGo, but both use SOPE's LDAP library/bindings. If the DSA supports LDAPv3 binds you shouldn't have any problems using it.
I'd recommend OpenLDAP any day, as it is far-and-away the faster and more feature-reach DSA. But I very much doubt it matters in regards to SOGo.
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
I develop on OpenGroupware, not SOGo, but both use SOPE's LDAP library/bindings. If the DSA supports LDAPv3 binds you shouldn't have any problems using it.
I'd recommend OpenLDAP any day, as it is far-and-away the faster and more feature-reach DSA. But I very much doubt it matters in regards to SOGo.
Adam,
Excellent. Thanks!
Max
Max Hetrick schrieb am 08.01.2009 17:23:
We have running at the moment eGroupWare, but we plan to migrate to SOGo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org) in the next two months (we had some annoying problems with eGW in the past). It has a really cool Webfrontend (looks like Thunderbird with Lightning) and has a really functional CalDAV-Interface which integrates perfectly into Thunderbird/Lightning. On the Website is a really good Install-Howto and it has even a yum repo.
Slightly OT, but just wondering if you are planning on running openLDAP on the SOGo Opengroupware installation, or whether or not you have an external LDAP server (CentOS DS or RHEL DS) that you are planning on using?
We have a mixed network and use Active Directory as central directory service. I had no problems to bind SOGo to ADS. But it should be no problem to use OpenLDAP or similar.
Greets René
For a completely /different/ idea...
I know several nonprofit and not-for-profit groups who coordinate their email and activities using a combination of GMail, google calendar(s) for scheduling, google apps for shared documents, and google group(s) for message board functionality. You can pull all this together with a google website, and put it under a domain name.
The advantages of doing it this way are no costs at all, no hardware, no hardware maintenance. you just have to figure out how to put the google pieces together and teach your users how to use this mashup you've created from the various google pieces...
the downside is that google is running everything, and you're relying on google goodwill to continue running this. your files and data are stored on their systems so you're subject to their privacy policies. and, of course, if your internet link is down, you'll have no access to any of it.
otherwise, um, if you really do want self hosting... pick your favorite email server (postfix, sendmail, etc), use cyrus imap, let your clients use any imap email app they prefer (Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or Live Mail, etc) and use openLDAP for a directory service. A wiki like DokuWiki can provide for group shared stuff... add in a calender server (webDAV wth iCAL files, or similar) that can be used with Thunderbird's Lightning Calendering plugin, and you've got quite a bit of groupware functionality right off the bat, including meeting invitations.
On 7-Jan-09, at 3:57 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
otherwise, um, if you really do want self hosting... pick your favorite email server (postfix, sendmail, etc), use cyrus imap, let your clients use any imap email app they prefer (Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or Live Mail, etc) and use openLDAP for a directory service. A wiki like DokuWiki can provide for group shared stuff... add in a calender server (webDAV wth iCAL files, or similar) that can be used with Thunderbird's Lightning Calendering plugin, and you've got quite a bit of groupware functionality right off the bat, including meeting invitations.
I had thought about going this way, but I could never find a calander server that I liked/ ran good under CentOS.
D
John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
[using google mail+calendar+etc]
The advantages of doing it this way are no costs at all,
Actually you only get 25 users for free. After that you have to pay for it. I'm using it on one of my domains and it's very very good, but too low a limit for any decent sized business.
Spiro Harvey wrote:
John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
[using google mail+calendar+etc]
The advantages of doing it this way are no costs at all,
Actually you only get 25 users for free. After that you have to pay for it. I'm using it on one of my domains and it's very very good, but too low a limit for any decent sized business.
does that apply to nonprofits like k12/edus ?
Actually you only get 25 users for free. After that you have to pay for it. I'm using it on one of my domains and it's very very good, but too low a limit for any decent sized business.
does that apply to nonprofits like k12/edus ?
Can't answer that without making stuff up. :)
Mine's not registered as a company, though, just a personal account and it has the 25 user restriction.
otherwise, um, if you really do want self hosting... pick your favorite email server (postfix, sendmail, etc), use cyrus imap, let your clients use any imap email app they prefer (Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or Live Mail, etc)
Agree strongly with PostFix+Cyrus. It is a very solid e-mail platform and it provides delayed expunge and unexpunge (data retention), shared folders included shared seen state, full-text indexing, and quotas.
and use openLDAP for a directory service.
I'd discourage this. LDAP is great, and OpenLDAP is a solid DSA, but LDAP makes a miserable "groupware" platform. No client other than Evolution supports updating LDAP, every other client is read-only. And no clients agree on schema. It's pretty awful for usability.
A wiki like DokuWiki can provide for group shared stuff... add in a calender server (webDAV wth iCAL files, or similar) that can be used with Thunderbird's Lightning Calendering plugin, and you've got quite a bit of groupware functionality right off the bat, including meeting invitations.
One needs to carefully define what you need and what features you want. "Calendaring" is very vague. Do you need resource reservation, conflict detection, participant roles, etc... For addressbooks GroupDAV is reasonably supported by most clients at this point (including Thunderbird). Calendering is more complicated. Most importantly, you *MUST* have GroupDAV or CalDAV for group calendering/collaboration - iCalendar is *not* a groupware solution, it just doesn't work for technical reasons.
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
I will consider Sun Java Communications Suite as a serious candidate. Usermanagement is running in the Sun Directory Server. The calendarserver integrates very well with thunderbird, outlook and the webinterface is quite usefull.
It is free, if You dont't need a support-contract.
Lars Schelde Institute of Astronautics Technische Universitüt München Germany
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end.
Kevin Thorpe wrote on Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:23:16 +0000:
Scalix
and just to name the third of the "big three": OpenXchange.
Kai
On Fri, January 9, 2009 6:23 am, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
We really do not use an email client here. We try to keep everything web based as much as possible. So interfacing with a email client such as outlook really isn't that important to me. The web interface is what I'm interested in. Bo
Bo Lynch schrieb:
On Fri, January 9, 2009 6:23 am, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
We really do not use an email client here. We try to keep everything web based as much as possible. So interfacing with a email client such as outlook really isn't that important to me. The web interface is what I'm interested in. Bo
Hm. Zimbra does _that_ very well IMO. Supports IE+FF+Safari, at least for the webmail-stuff.
I'm not sure if the Open-Source version actually supports the Outlook-stuff (we use the commercial version and I don't use Outlook anyway...).
I'd give Zimbra a try. It's relatively easy to setup, at least for a demo-case where you are not interested in customizing all the logos.
Rainer
On Fri, January 9, 2009 10:07 am, Rainer Duffner wrote:
Bo Lynch schrieb:
On Fri, January 9, 2009 6:23 am, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
We really do not use an email client here. We try to keep everything web based as much as possible. So interfacing with a email client such as outlook really isn't that important to me. The web interface is what I'm interested in. Bo
Hm. Zimbra does _that_ very well IMO. Supports IE+FF+Safari, at least for the webmail-stuff.
I'm not sure if the Open-Source version actually supports the Outlook-stuff (we use the commercial version and I don't use Outlook anyway...).
I'd give Zimbra a try. It's relatively easy to setup, at least for a demo-case where you are not interested in customizing all the logos.
Rainer
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model. Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
Bo
Bo Lynch schrieb:
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model.
The chance is always there. I come from the BSD-world, where this is happening regularly (or actually designed to happen).
Think about it: if outside contributions are minimal and lot's of people offer services around the product without some sort of revenue-sharing, the product will die one way or the other. This is what happened with Nessus. Zimbra is way too complicated to survive as a "pure" non-company-sponsored GPL OSS-project. It's in the same league as OpenOffice IMO. Do you think OO would exist without SUN sponsoring most of the devs around the main project?
In the BSD-world, it's a "valid" business-model to create some "fork" of a technology, commercialize it and later release most of it back into the tree. Even in GNU-land, you have more and more GPL-products with proprietary extensions for paying customers.
What I want to say is: I believe Zimbra chose their license not because they wanted to cheat, but because they actually wanted to be able to keep stuff open-source while at the same time ensuring the company's commercial viability.
Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
Well, that's your choice. AFAIK, apache also has a BSD-style license that would allow it to keep the source for themselves - doesn't stop you (or most everyone) from using it, I assume...
What happens to a product over one, two or three or more years is anyone's guess. Certainly, yahoo + zimbra have plans (that they don't want to share with us, most likely) - but wether these plans can actually be put into working is another question.
Release 5.0.x is out now and will be supported for quite some time. Release 6.0 will arrive sometime next year. No change in license is visible for it now.
I think Zimbra has always been profitable as a company, at least before the Yahoo! acquisition. If this continues, I don't see Yahoo making lot's of changes. (Well, in an ideal world...)
cheers, Rainer
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009, Bo Lynch wrote: ...
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model. Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
The thing I would be concerned about is the future of Yahoo. If it is finally absorbed by the Borg of Redmond, history says that anything that competes with Windows will be dropped.
Bill
on 1-9-2009 9:23 AM Bill Campbell spake the following:
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009, Bo Lynch wrote: ...
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model. Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
The thing I would be concerned about is the future of Yahoo. If it is finally absorbed by the Borg of Redmond, history says that anything that competes with Windows will be dropped.
Bill
You never know with them. But they have been making big reaches into the SAAS model. I guess it is easier to charge monthly instead of depending on the "buy a new version every few years" model they currently have.
If they could use it as the backend for hotmail, they could go against their new best enemy Google!
Bill Campbell wrote:
...
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model. Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
The thing I would be concerned about is the future of Yahoo. If it is finally absorbed by the Borg of Redmond, history says that anything that competes with Windows will be dropped.
But that era may be over if MS now wants to compete with Google...
On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 13:15 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Bill Campbell wrote:
...
Should I be concerned with the Licensing structure down the road? Meaning in your opinion do you think that zimbra will close its door on the open source model. Just don't want to demo something get everyone excited about using it and have to migrate to something else.
The thing I would be concerned about is the future of Yahoo. If it is finally absorbed by the Borg of Redmond, history says that anything that competes with Windows will be dropped.
But that era may be over if MS now wants to compete with Google...
---- Exchange is a Microsoft cash cow - if they were to buy Yahoo (which Balmer says isn't going to happen), Zimbra would be folded up - there's not a chance in the world that they would sell it off.
Craig
Hm. Zimbra does _that_ very well IMO. Supports IE+FF+Safari, at least for the webmail-stuff.
I'm not sure if the Open-Source version actually supports the Outlook-stuff (we use the commercial version and I don't use Outlook anyway...).
I'd give Zimbra a try. It's relatively easy to setup, at least for a demo-case where you are not interested in customizing all the logos.
Rainer
One thing I have found interesting with Zimbra is that you can use their open source community edition and then get the outlook connector as an add-on for the users you want/need. We have a full licensed version due to the request to keep using outlook from most people. I would say their web based client is very good, but others are good too. We looked at Scalix and found it a little more complicated and complex than we were comfortable with going with. Having components that I was familiar with from prior experience in the linux world was a big help vs learning new.
Andrew
Bo Lynch wrote:
We really do not use an email client here. We try to keep everything web based as much as possible. So interfacing with a email client such as outlook really isn't that important to me. The web interface is what I'm interested in.
Have you looked at the SME server disto from http://www.contribs.org? It installs as an appliance-like setup managed through a simple web interface. The code is mostly centos and includes hoard webmail running over dovecot with maildir storage out of the box. It doesn't have a shared calendar or other groupware components in the base setup and it is somewhat difficult to modify the already-customized configuration but there are a number of contributed add-ons that might provide them. Unfortunately the site seems to be down for maintenance right now so I can't check on them. Anyway, for a few hundred people, the setup really is as simple as answering a few questions and adding the users and it can also provide file/print/web/vpn services.
Have you looked at the SME server disto from http://www.contribs.org? It installs as an appliance-like setup managed through a simple web interface. The code is mostly centos and includes hoard webmail running over dovecot with maildir storage out of the box. It doesn't have a shared calendar or other groupware components in the base setup and it is somewhat difficult to modify the already-customized configuration but there are a number of contributed add-ons that might provide them. Unfortunately the site seems to be down for maintenance right now so I can't check on them. Anyway, for a few hundred people, the setup really is as simple as answering a few questions and adding the users and it can also provide file/print/web/vpn services.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com _______________________________________________
We have been using SME server 7.x for a long time now and I'm very happy with it. The installation is very straight forward and it does standard email out of the box. To get groupware, you need to install the egroupware / phpgroupware addons and then you have a good groupware as well. Support is generally good, but SME still runs on CentOS 4.7 and not 5.x They are working on SME 8.x which runs on CentOS 5.2 though, but there's no stable release yet.
On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end.
I would be careful with Scalix. My son used to work at a place where they went with Scalix for 300+ users. The day to day maintenance on it can be a real bear. When you have a real problem that requires support, Scalix support is less than helpful. He left that job for another but still keeps in touch with his old boss. The old boss has told him that due to the Scalix problems they are budgeting for replacing Scalix with Exchange.
On the other side of the coin, when it works, it works well and integrates well with Outlook. It is just overly complex under the hood.
FWIW, they had Scalix running for 3+ years.
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I would stick in a suggestion to look at Scalix. Not free at 300 users, but it does run nicely on CentOS. Integrates well with Outlook and has a very nice webmail front end.
I would be careful with Scalix. My son used to work at a place where they went with Scalix for 300+ users. The day to day maintenance on it can be a real bear. When you have a real problem that requires support, Scalix support is less than helpful. He left that job for another but still keeps in touch with his old boss. The old boss has told him that due to the Scalix problems they are budgeting for replacing Scalix with Exchange. On the other side of the coin, when it works, it works well and integrates well with Outlook. It is just overly complex under the hood.
This is one of the beauties of OpenGroupware - it's just PostgreSQL and the filesystem. Simple and clean; PostgreSQL 8.3 performance is very good. And you just reuse whatever SMTP/IMAP architecture you have or want, this a strong bias towards Cyrus (of course).
That is how it should be, IMHO, subsystems should be loosely coupled; but it does make it more difficult to implement some features.
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
This is one of the beauties of OpenGroupware - it's just PostgreSQL and the filesystem. Simple and clean; PostgreSQL 8.3 performance is very good. And you just reuse whatever SMTP/IMAP architecture you have or want, this a strong bias towards Cyrus (of course).
That is how it should be, IMHO, subsystems should be loosely coupled; but it does make it more difficult to implement some features.
The problem has always been that there is not a standard calendar subsystem, particularly for shared group access. So you end up stuck with a web calendar and no client-side alerts or taking whatever you have to run to make your chosen client work.
maybe can look at http://nexist.sourceforge.net/groupware.html. cheers
2009/1/7 Bo Lynch blynch@ameliaschools.com:
Just wanted to get some thoughts from the list.....
We are a public k-12 school and are looking to migrate to a groupware style system for out staff to collaborate better. Currently we are using Squirrelmail/postfix for email. Does anyone have any recommendations/opinions. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you -- Bo Lynch Systems Administrator RedHat Academy Instructor Energy Manager Amelia County Public Schools
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 11:29 -0600, Ricardo Carrillo wrote:
maybe can look at http://nexist.sourceforge.net/groupware.html.
Nothing on that list has been updated since 2004! If you want to do searching use a mainstream site like http://www.freshmeat.net (although many projects, including ours [OpenGroupware] do a lousy job of keeping their entries up to date).
Only was a reference for groupware names, you have to search into software repositories like freshmeat as well sourceforge.
2009/1/9 Adam Tauno Williams awilliam@whitemice.org:
On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 11:29 -0600, Ricardo Carrillo wrote:
maybe can look at http://nexist.sourceforge.net/groupware.html.
Nothing on that list has been updated since 2004! If you want to do searching use a mainstream site like http://www.freshmeat.net (although many projects, including ours [OpenGroupware] do a lousy job of keeping their entries up to date).
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