Kolab Now vs Kolab groupware

[Geoff Nordli]

Hi Milan.

Comments inline.

On 2020-01-05 4:28 a.m., Milan Petrovic wrote:
> 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.

It would be great to have some Collabora integration.  Have you tried 
integrating Kolab and Nextcloud together?

> 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".

That is how Roundcube shows Calendars?  That sounds like a bug. Why list 
an object in the interface that you have no access to.

> 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.
>
Thanks for you feedback.  As I mentioned with Mihai, I created a document.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UtZXATe_qRw1UJWluT9ABq6hkd4OcoBf33bjZ7o6sXc/edit?usp=sharing

Maybe we could start piecing things together a bit more.

Geoff