Kolab Now vs Kolab groupware

[MIhai Badici]

Hi Aleksander.
>
> I have been using Kolab as an e-mail server only.  Probably about 15 
> years now with various installations for small businesses.  I keep 
> circling back every few years hoping I can replace Exchange Server.
>
> I think it would help if there was a clients page like we used to have 
> on the 2.x wiki.
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20070516081516/http://www.kolab.org/about-kolab-clients.html 
>
>
> If it could list the different clients people are using and what the 
> expectations are.
>
> If people are having success with Outlook we should be shouting from 
> the rooftops.
>
> I will even volunteer to write it up.  If people can send me what they 
> have working, then I will put it in a document and we can post it 
> somewhere.
>
> thanks,
>
> Geoff

Hello Geoff

I will wrote few words about "replacing Exchange Server" from my 
experience. I joined this project with similar ideas ( in fact I first 
started to build my own ldap-centric project because i wasn't aware of 
kolab )

Replacing Exchange with ... exchange is neither an easy task :) I 
recently migrated from 2007 to 2013 ( because there is no path to 
migrate directly to 2016) and I had enough troubles to postpone the 
migration to the current version few months in order to allow the 
situation to stabilize( for example i discovered they used a public 
folder and this feature was removed in next versions). There are a lot 
of changes in exchange and outlook and the compatibility between 
versions is poor.

Now, about mail client:

IMHO in a corporate environment is nearly impossible to remove outlook. 
Even if you will find a better client, you will find someday a stupid 
feature who is missing. But the real problem is to deploy the client. 
Thunderbird work pretty well and it has plugins for each feature you 
want. But can we deploy the plugins via group policy? Never tried but it 
will be tough. And you will deploy Outlook anyway, because you cannot 
avoid MsOffice. A corporation  without powerpoint is not a corporation, 
without powerpoint people will be forced to work  :)

So there is only Outlook you can consider. I made some tests with 
Outlook2010 in the past and seems to work well with ActiveSync. But I 
didn't use it daily. Also there are plugins for caldav if you want to 
use it with IMAP (here there is the same problem , you will need to 
configure them one by one because the autoconfiguration is only about 
the e-mail account). The newest versions of outlook are dificult to be 
configured manually, I don't know, for example, how to force it to use 
ActiveSync instead of IMAP via autoconf. The big pain here is the IMAP 
implementation on Outlook is not always work flawless but it looks it 
was improved in newest version.

Now, about the features:

  I had a HTC corporate smartphone around 2008 running windows CE and 
outlook. This years having ActiveSync with contacts and calendar was 
"THE BIG THING". Everybody want it and I installed a lot of Windows SBS 
with exchange precisely for this feature.

Nowadays people with android smartphones are more or less forced to use 
a google account and will syncronize the contacts with this one. The big 
advantage is when you leave the company you will go with the contacts, 
which is an unwrited  law among corporate people :)  .  I have enough 
installs of kolab servers with ActiveSync working well but I know maybe 
two people who really use the address book.

There is still the global agenda which is more or less useful. But the 
only install I had where the global agenda was maintained properly ( 
with phone numbers, at least, maybe photos) was one where I used 
openldap on linux and I made a small "site" where the HR department can  
upload/change those data. Here Active Directory is not an example at 
all. I don't know HR people willing to use the AD MMC and you cannot 
maintain GAL with IT department. Here we can do more with kolab :)


The only important thing remaining seems to be the calendar. I use 
dovecot for IMAP where seems to be difficult to use shared contacts or 
calendars but in fact nobody want to manage multiple calendars. You 
receive an invite and add it to your calendar. If you have an working 
calendar ( with iRony on desktop and ActiveSync on mobile) will be great 
and in fact it works. Having shared calendars for objects ( conference 
rooms, cars, demo devices) will be also great and I think it works with 
kolab ( i can't do it with dovecot)

Now, I think the most used new feature in Exchange is "skype for 
business" . There is no big integration deal ( just having the same 
account) but group calls are more and more popular.  Here you will need 
a solution if you want to replace Exchange. I spent lot of time triyng 
to use ejabberd or openfire for xmpp but it look this is a dead end . 
Probably using mattermost is the right way to do it. I used for 2-3 
years for a 20 users company RocketChat as conference solution. This is 
a sort of "hipster-driven" server, their ldap implementation is rather 
hilarious ( it need periodic sincronization, sort of offline sync) and I 
was loosing the chat history at nearly every upgrade   but peoples where 
rather happy with this apps, working either from browser or using a 
client .

There are also some "small things" who can become more important than 
the "big ones". You can't use "sieve filters" with outlook. When using 
Exchange ( or any other groupware) you will need to create filtering 
rules on the server. ATM, you can do that only using roundcube. There is 
a sieve plugin for thunderbird but it require sieve syntax knowledge so 
it is unusable anyway. The most stupid missing feature is the ability to 
set vacation messages ( you can do it from roundcube because it is a 
sieve filter too but nobody will search for this feature in the 
"filters" tab). One of my most successful solution was to rename this 
tab "autoresponder and filters" :)  Anyway , we will need an user 
friendly sieve outlook (and thunderbird)  plugin .

As I said, Microsoft removed the "public folders" feature in Exchange. 
It was, indeed, a wrong way to use file sharing. That's why I prefer to 
use the owncloud integration: sharing files is a different thing, there 
are different product implementing it; but is nice to have the 
possibility to attach those files. I have webdav owncloud implemented 
for one customer, it works pretty well now but is not so popular. But 
maybe for larger companies could be useful.


Well, it was pretty long. Maybe I missed things but the fact is the 
major issues are solved but the devil is in the details..

Mihai





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