Kolab Now vs Kolab groupware

[Milan Petrovic]

Really great response, reflects pretty accurate the situation with MS
Exchange vs. Kolab.
Wanted to add my experience. I'm not used to running MS Exchange and have
limited knowledge of Outlook (I was using it in a corporate environment but
not recently, so I don;t remember much about it - the only feature I used a
lot there was to "send a message at a later date/time, this can be, sort
of, done in Thunderbird, but it's a client side feature and you have to
have your client open and running in order to have it working as intended).
I love that Kolab supports Activesync. Most of the mobile clients are
connected that way to my Kolab instances: I have a 3.4 instance and a
Winterfell one. Both instances have Seafile "attached" for enhanced file
sharing capabilities and the Winterfell has Collabora office. Tech savvy
users love to use things online: they access the mail through Roundcube,
file sharing through Seafile, etc. They love the Collabora integration. Non
tech savvy people are using clients, mostly through mobile and their usage
is usually pretty basic.
What I find as an issue with Kolab to gain more traction is, as Mihai said,
the need to use the web client in order to manage the mail account. There
is no other way to set the filters server wide for example. Also, there is
no way to apply tagging with filters - a feature I miss a lot.
Sharing of resources is also very weird: if there is a calendar or any
other resource shared between people, the resource will be shown to other
people in a folder like structure with its full path (if I have "My
Calendar" and I create a new one, "Meetings", and share it with another
user, and they enable it in folder settings to be visible, they'd see below
their "My calendar" a number of nested grayed out folders like "Calendars \
shared \ Owners username \ " and then the "Meetings" calendar as a
subfolder of the last one - it's just confusing for non-tech-savvy people).
This also goes for other  shared resources/folders. Same visibility happens
if you create a shared resource through the admin interface - you see the
full hierarchy path of the shared resource in Roundcube. In general,
calendar management is a bit of a pain if you go beyond "each user uses his
own calendar through Roundcube".
File sharing to external users needs to be done through the Seafile
interface - this also needs a bit of explaining to users, but they get it
(at least in my case).
Now, I haven't tried Outlook with Kolab, but things do work without it for
me.
I also have a number of external services relying on Kolab's LDAP, like
Matrix/Riot for communication (chat/voice/video - I've picked Matrix as it
was the only solution with mobile clients actually ringing like a phone
when you do an audio call, but in general I'm very happy with it and how it
handles security). Matrix has LDAP integration that syncs well, but it is a
rudimentary implementation. It took me days to make it work and as the LDAP
implementation is not actively worked on some features work better than the
others (I can create and  authenticate users, but still cannot pull all the
user data about them beside the username so this has to be manually added
after the user logs in for the first time).
I ended up writing a manual with around 30 pages, in English, that every
user receives on their account creation, explaining how to use the entire
'system' of apps.

Despite the issues above I still love Kolab and all the features it gives
out of the box. Winterfell is a visible step-up with constant updates and I
hope the issues I have mentioned will be ironed out in the future. Web
client is beautiful. It's better to view it as an alternative to Google's
Gmail and O365 than to Exchange server/Outlook. All the people using it
mostly through web love it also. The office documents collaborative editing
also works and makes it even more a viable alternative to Gmail/O365.
Anyway, I'll definitely keep using it. I hope this has helped you.


On Sun, Jan 5, 2020 at 10:49 AM MIhai Badici <mihai at badici.ro> wrote:

>
> 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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> > users at lists.kolab.org
> > https://lists.kolab.org/mailman/listinfo/users
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