Kolab Now vs Kolab groupware

[MIhai Badici]

>
> I find the manual configuration of a client to not be a show stopper.  
> If it takes me 5 extra minutes to configure a client, that is not a 
> big deal.

Well, that's ok for 25, maybe 50 users. I had also 300-400 users, and 
not in the same city. Replacing Exchange should include this case as 
well because Group Policy is a powerful tool and sometime you can find 
admins who really know to use it :)

>
>>
>> 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.
>
> The one client I have just uses IMAP with their phones to connect.  
> That seems to be working well enough for them.  I assume the 
> caldav/cardav sync should be more than enough.

It's still great to have activesync and contacts/calendar in sync with 
your computer. And it works pretty well with kolab. I had a situation in 
a past ( actually with MS Exchange, not kolab) when people complaint  
about battery discarging faster when using IMAP instead of ActiveSync. I 
don't know if it was real but could be.

>
> Isn't Cyrus the only option?  When I look at other mail projects they 
> are either using Sogo or Nextcloud for calendaring.  I think part of 
> the benefit of Kolab is having Contacts/Calendars built right into the 
> mail server.   Are you thinking different?
>
Cyrus is the default option but dovecot will work to, with some 
restriction. Dovecot has metadata implementation too - so yes, is 
precisely why I prefer kolab, just like you - but it looks like they 
didn't implemented it for public/shared folders. I suspect the main 
reason is because nobody requested it so i consider to ask for that or 
maybe find some time to start to implement it - should not be so 
difficult because must be similar to private folders.

But dovecot has the advantage of self-creating folder and autocreate the 
broken indexes so the management is simpler and is used at larger scale 
so I use it when it is possible.

>
> OK, I wasn't even thinking about conferencing.  One client that wants 
> chat I use Openfire and Jitsi.  I am not thinking conferencing is that 
> big of a deal.  Is RocketChat the default conferencing engine for 
> Nextcloud?  I see that Nextcloud has a "talk/text/video" feature.  I 
> haven't checked it out yet.

No, RocketChat is a totally independent project ( and actually it was 
the customer choice) But there are cases when the company is distributed 
among many cities - it was the case - and people need to see each 
other.  I tried to use the nextcloud feature too, seems to be rather 
incomplete, but I really see the necessity to have a solution here. I 
think I have seen  a mattermost plugin on the kolab repo, so, if it is 
mattermost, is great too.


>
>>
>> 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 .
>
> yes, that is a pain.  If people are doing an OOF, they actually 
> contact me and I do it for them.  It is not ideal.

Yes, that's my problem since the begining. There is a seting in newest 
managesieve plugin which enable oof as separate item in the menu , it's 
a big step forward :)   I didn't noticed it till yesterday  because I 
have some configuration templates I use but our discussion was useful:

// Enables separate management interface for vacation responses 
(out-of-office)
// 0 - no separate section (default),
// 1 - add Vacation section,
// 2 - add Vacation section, but hide Filters section
$config['managesieve_vacation'] = 1;

that's at least in rc 1.4 I test currently

>
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> I am not deploying nextcloud for the few clients that needs file 
> sharing.  It seems to be working well.
Yes, owncloud/nextcloud is ok, also people use seafile I didn't used but 
should be ok too. It's not mandatory but nice to have.