Kolab vs Scalix

[Michael Pasdziernik]

Hello Liutauras,

we used scalix some time before we migrated to kolab. Scalix is very useful 
and the outlook connector works good. The base of scalix is HP OpenMail
which is a really stable and mature platform. As a long time linux 
administrator I prefer kolab because of its well know server components, 
scalix always was a bit like a black box to me. 

Our main reason for the migration was that the webclient is very buggy and 
slow. It is based on java/tomcat and has serious performance issues, even 
with five concurrent users on a dedicated server (2,8 GHz P4, 2 GB RAM). They 
worked on the problem but never managed to solve our issues (we only used 
forum support).
The user experience regarding scalix webmail was very bad. It has to much 
Ajax.The user sees something that looks like a desktop client but acts slow 
like a webclient. So webclient did never receive any acceptance by our users.
Horde is much better in that way.
Another annoyance was that the regular updates do not only fix bugs and 
security issues but also introduced new features with new bugs.
I think their QA for the community version is not so good, I do not know if
paid versions are more stable.

The only problem with kolab in my opinion is the missing windows client for
power users, that means users with thousands of messages and several
GBytes mailbox size.
Konsec does not allow more then 3GB of mailbox-size, Toltec
has some issus with synchronisation on big mailboxes.
Currently I am evaluating the new bynari insight connector and this looks very 
promising.

What I like about kolab is the growing choice of clients. If kontact for Win 
an synckolab are stable you can choose between kontact, outlook, thunderbird, 
horde and syncml-clients.

Regards
Michael






On Wednesday, 16. July 2008 08:53:56 Liutauras Adomaitis wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> does anybody knows anything about Kolab and Scalix comparison. We are
> choosing
> solution for groupware server for 40 users network. All users are with
> Windows workstations. We didn't decided, but as a client we plan to use
> either MS Outlook (2003/2007) or Mozilla Thunderbird. Outlook is more
> mature,
> but Thunderbird is closer to our "Open Source Spirit".
> We have tested Kolab2 and several connectors to Outlook did not seem to
> work
>
> very well (some are not MAPI, the others work very slow). SyncKolab also
> did
>
> not act the way we expected. I understand that there maybe our problems,
> but
>
> still it is problems for us.
> We did not tested Scalix yet, but got some recommendations about it.
>
> So what does Kolab users think about Kolab and Scalix.
> - Server installation, maintenance and backup
> - Commercial support (this is a big issue for us)
> - Outlook support
> - Thunderbird support
> - Webmail (Horde vs Scalix Java webmail)
> - Any links on the web about this comparison
>
> Price is not a big issue for us as long as it is cheaper than Exchange.
>
> Liutauras