Topic: Microsoft Exchange Server Linux Replacement

[Teviot]

Does anyone know of or is anyone working on a Microsoft Exchange Server Linux Replacement?

I guess what I'm looking for is a package one SME that functions in the same way that Microsoft Exchange Server functions in respect to mail, calendar, etc.

Does any one know of such a package?

[EdelingF]

GroupOffice (http://wiki.contribs.org/GroupOffice) does a lot "Exchange" jobs for me, but I think you're looking for a Exchange-equivilant.
Have you looked at Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com) allready?

[Teviot]

Thanks for your quick response EdelingF.

I have use GroupOffice before and stopped because I am looking for a package that works with Microsoft Outlook the same way as Microsoft Exchange Server or as close to it as possible.

Have you or anyone else tested Zimbra on SME?

[Stefano]

Thanks for your quick response EdelingF.

I have use GroupOffice before and stopped because I am looking for a package that works with Microsoft Outlook the same way as Microsoft Exchange Server or as close to it as possible.

if so, sad to say, you can use only exchange.. every linux solution you will try will be different from exchange and need connectors (for which you have to pay, for es. toltec)

Have you or anyone else tested Zimbra on SME?

AFAIK zimbra can't be installed on sme, is not free, and is not so easy to maintain..

my 2c
Ciao
Stefano

[Mjohnson]

You can try Zarafa.  The SME implementation right now is still under development, but it works very well.

It is listed in the Contribs section.

[EdelingF]

No I didn't try Zimbra; just Googled it.
I know there are connectors for Group Office to work with Outlook and yes, you have to pay for them. If I'm correct they're not that expensive.
Zafara looks promising, can't wait to try that but waiting for a more stable version.

[Stefano]

You can try Zarafa.  The SME implementation right now is still under development, but it works very well.

it's a good choice, but not a exchange replacement.. I mean, accordingo to this page, in the community version you can have only 3 users using outlook connector..

so, if OP wants his users to continue using outlook, he has to buy the product.. in this page I read that zarafa is licensed on user's number and yearly..

with 20 or more users it costs like exchange.. and that's a pity..

Ciao
Stefano

[Mjohnson]

it's a good choice, but not a exchange replacement

Well, above (3) Outlook Client users it is not a FREE exchange replacement, that is true, but Zarafa's operation is almost spot on to Exchange.  Also it has no user limits for IMAP clients (i.e. Thunderbird), or IMAP Mobile devices and the webmail access is almost a direct knockoff of Outlook Web Access which provides "almost" the same functionality as Outlook.

It is certainly worth a look and integrates nicely into SME.  It does not appear to affect SME's ability to be upgraded, which is very much a concern of mine.

[David Harper]

If you are willing to compromise a little then you can use Horde as your groupware suite.

SME Horde has Turba (contacts) installed, and if you add in some contribs it can do calendars (Kronolith), notes (Mnemo) and tasks (Nag).

The trick is how you want to use these features in Outlook. Horde can be synchronised with Outlook using the Funambol sync tool (after a quick change to the main config file). There are two basic usage scenarios that I have tried:

• Each user has seperate calendar, contacts etc., and uses Funambol to sync these into Horde, as a backup and so they can access their stuff in Webmail
• In addition to their own standard contacts/calendar/notes/tasks, each user has access to a shared company calendar, address book etc., that is synced by Funambol from a seperate company account ("corpbook" or similar)

If you use either of these in combination with a Roaming Profile, and saving user PST files in a server location, rather than in the default Local Settings folder, then either of these scenarios could be reasonably attractive, and it's a lot less work than say, GroupOffice, because Horde is already integrated into SME.

Funambol is also a free download, which means that this solution is 100% Free.

[soprom]

EGroupware and Funambol won't let share between users.
Toltec Outlook connector may have what you want.

I did Exchange replacement with cyrus-imap and Toltec (low cost) on SME7 and it survived all updates.

Clarkconnect has cyrus-imap built-in.

SME7 needs heavy modifications for cyrus-imap and it applies to all users (not per-user option). Hard to maintain if there are problems.

For SME7, I would look at Zarafa. I understand that members of the dev-team are working hard at this.

My second choice is Egroupware and Funambol (no cost), depending of your needs.

[jdavey]

Zarafa - specifically the web client - has been working well for me. A few things to fix (Signature, Next / Previous in the message pane, and spell check!!!). It went in easily enough, thanks to the work of Darrell May (I still have a VM of twiggi running on an old test box!). I have a several former franchisees of an Insurance broker that recently filed BK, and they had OWA provided by the franchiser, and find Zarafa a workable solution. I would recommend that Zarafa be included as an option for webmail access. Yes Horde is faster, but it looks so old that it turns folks off. And most people are used to a Gmail / Yahoo solution that includes drag and drop / AJAX.

[jdavey]

Zarafa - specifically the web client - has been working well for me. A few things to fix (Signature, Next / Previous in the message pane, and spell check!!!). It went in easily enough, thanks to the work of Darrell May (I still have a VM of twiggi running on an old test box!). I have a several former franchisees of an Insurance broker that recently filed BK, and they had OWA provided by the franchiser, and find Zarafa a workable solution. I would recommend that Zarafa be included as an option for webmail access. Yes Horde is faster, but it looks so old that it turns folks off. And most people are used to a Gmail / Yahoo solution that includes drag and drop / AJAX.

[edform]

Zarafa - specifically the web client - has been working well for me. A few things to fix (Signature, Next / Previous in the message pane, and spell check!!!). It went in easily enough, thanks to the work of Darrell May (I still have a VM of twiggi running on an old test box!). I have a several former franchisees of an Insurance broker that recently filed BK, and they had OWA provided by the franchiser, and find Zarafa a workable solution. I would recommend that Zarafa be included as an option for webmail access. Yes Horde is faster, but it looks so old that it turns folks off. And most people are used to a Gmail / Yahoo solution that includes drag and drop / AJAX.

This is still a major shortfall of SME, a point that I've been raising from time to time for some years.

I got quite excited about Zarafa for a week or two, then I discovered that it is lacking in some very fundamental areas. One in particular is that the label and category items in the Calendar cannot be customised - I don't have a client who doesn't want this feature. Horde has it, but, as several people have observed in the various discussions on this subject, Horde looks so awful.  Both Scalix and Zimbra work and would be ideal, but they don't fit the SME server at all well - I've even got one client using an SME machine as the main server with all email served by a second machine running Centos 5 and Zimbra, but that is too much for many small systems.

Why isn't someone writing a Windows application that knows how to talk to Horde? As I've said before, I've got a grand waiting for that development project because I see it as the most important item required by a Linux server system to allow it to hop up into the mainstream. Connectivity to Outlook isn't the way to go: it's effectively an admission that an all-Microsoft solution is the best, but for those who can't afford it - Well! Here's a slightly lower grade workround. What is needed is a new destop application or a first rate Ajax client talking to a MySQL backend.

Ed Form

[cactus]

Why isn't someone writing a Windows application that knows how to talk to Horde? As I've said before, I've got a grand waiting for that development project because I see it as the most important item required by a Linux server system to allow it to hop up into the mainstream.

Most likely as Horde is a (web)interface to a mail/groupware server just like thunderbird or outlook can be. So they are there already. I even think that writing a application that scrapes web interfaces is a very bad thing, one flaw or code change could render your application useless. Talk to the groupware server directly, they communicate in clearly outlined protocols (some more standard and general than others, I know).

Perhaps your money is better spent on consultancy to fix the hurdles you are facing:

• Hire a grpahic webdesigner to design a template for Horde which looks better, serve that back to the community I think a lot of people would be thankfull for your well spent money.
• Donate to the dynamic version of Horde as they are developing such a feature AFAIK: http://www.horde.org/dimp/

Undoubtetly there are even more ways to spent your bucks and have a groupware solution more to your liking.

[shawnbishop]

I was also looking for  a replacement...

Look at Kerio Mail Server or DeskNow...

[edform]

Most likely as Horde is a (web)interface to a mail/groupware server just like thunderbird or outlook can be. So they are there already. I even think that writing a application that scrapes web interfaces is a very bad thing, one flaw or code change could render your application useless. Talk to the groupware server directly, they communicate in clearly outlined protocols (some more standard and general than others, I know).

Perhaps your money is better spent on consultancy to fix the hurdles you are facing:

• Hire a grpahic webdesigner to design a template for Horde which looks better, serve that back to the community I think a lot of people would be thankfull for your well spent money.
• Donate to the dynamic version of Horde as they are developing such a feature AFAIK: http://www.horde.org/dimp/

Undoubtetly there are even more ways to spent your bucks and have a groupware solution more to your liking.

The current version of Horde has  a raft of silly problems that the last version didn't have - it won't run properly in kiosk-mode opera, or any setup of Firefox - the shared calender switching function doesn't work. When you date-arrow forward in Work-week view you can arrow back to this week, but not back further to previous weeks: you have to use 'goto' to get to an earlier date and then revert to work-week view. And calendar behaviour when a recurring all day event and an early morning appointment are made on the same day is really weird. I'm sure they'll sort it out but I've got one client who is tearing his hair out with it.

Ed Form

[edform]

I was also looking for  a replacement...

Look at Kerio Mail Server or DeskNow...

I've spent the last two days getting Kerio to run on my test box and it's really rather nice. It's completely self-contained and wants to use ports 25, 80,110, 119, 143, 389, 443, 465, 563, 636 and 995 so I used the Service Control contrib to disable all the SME services involved and simply loaded Kerio from its rpm. Putting the server start command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local got it restarting after reboots and I've now populated it with a few big email stores and it works well.

One useful difference from Zarafa is that the webmail interface text is all stored in an editable text file [/opt/kerio/mailserver/translations/webmail/*.def - chose the one that speaks the same language as you] so the whole thing can be customised.

I'm going to start a new thread to seek some advice on this approach of getting rid of all the standard SME services that conflict with the functions of a preferred application because it might open the door to using some potentially nice software.

Ed Form

[shawnbishop]

I have a feeling this is going to be come quite a well commented and used thread...I will install Kerio today as see how is goes..

[Teviot]

Doesn't Kerio and some of these other suggestions use IMAP?  Surely there is something out there that use the same ports and protocol as Exchange and Outlook?

Unless I'm mistaken Exchange and outlook use port 80 with some sort of coding with allows it to go though any port blocking that any ISP might put on.

[edform]

Doesn't Kerio and some of these other suggestions use IMAP?  Surely there is something out there that use the same ports and protocol as Exchange and Outlook?

Unless I'm mistaken Exchange and outlook use port 80 with some sort of coding with allows it to go though any port blocking that any ISP might put on.

Kerio has inbuilt support for Outlook. I'm looking at other software as well because I try really hard not to pay for software on servers - except when I call in support people to do the hard bits.

Ed Form

[si_blakely]

The OpenChange project (in conjunction with the Samba team) is developing the protocols and infrastructure to allow a pure opensource Exchange replacement. The problem has not been the back-end systems, but the fact that the Exchange client/server protocols were not documented/understood, and anyone who actually reverse-engineered the protocols to do so was justifiably charging for the implementation (and they were focussed on the Outlook/MAPI client end of things).

I suspect that as the Exchange server protocols get developed, a protocol layer mapping Exchange protocols to IMAP/ICAL/VCARD/LDAP servers will pop up, allowing native Outlook access to open-source servers. This will rely on Samba4, which will provide the Active Directory equivalent, and will hopefully standardise LDAP directory structure for groupware.

For me, the issue is integration. I have OpenXchange running on my SME server, which works OK. But the real winning feature for me was the reconfiguring of LDAP to support authentication and address books (personal and global). This allows Thunderbird and Horde (read-only) access to the global address book, and I use OpenXchange or KDE-PIM to manage the address book. I even dump the LDAP addresses into Spamassassin for whitelisting. The only feature I really miss is SIEVE support in DoveCot.

But if I decided to use a different groupware server, I may lose the LDAP functionality or structure, and I would be upset about that.

Si

[kevinb]

Just a quick comment.....

We have been testing SOGo as an Exchange/Outlook replacement and have been very impressed. It uses a webmail client as well as Thunderbird/Lightning with contact and calendar sharing and ACL's.

I would think it could be incorporated into SME.

Kevin

[mdo]

I have become aware of SOGo only recently but have started reading and I would be very interested in trying to integrate this into SME.
We think their approach for Thunderbird/Lightning is much better than the Zarafa (Outlook) way to go.
Could you share your steps so far and maybe we can start a larger group of interested users to discuss?
Thanks, Michael

[kevinb]

Hello Michael,

To me it looks like SOGo on SME 8 might be an overall better combination than Horde on SME and may be the best replacement for Exchange/Outlook.

I have been successful running SME 7.4 with the LDAP contrib and SOGo on it's own Centos 5.3 server authenticating against SME LDAP. My steps are here http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,44420.0.html. Please contact me if there are any problems or questions.

I believe there may be a way to build SOGo on Centos 4.X and thus install on SME 7.4. It may be simpler to wait on SME 8 RC. There is a Mysql option for SOGo too.

My attempt at a local install on SME 8 was not successful. It believe it is an Apache http.conf redirection issue.

Kevin

[girkers]

I like this idea, just last week I finally got a phone with Windows Mobile on it and got an older version of funambol to work on it to connect to my SME 7.4 server.

I would really like to see this work on a block standard SME server, even if it is version 8, as to position SME as a "true" alternative to Windows Server, this functionality is a must. I do however also appreciate the limited resources available to the project so using and integrating a ready made product would make sense, but then again the work required to combine this may outway the benefits. All would depend on priorities.