Slashdot Mirror

Zarafa , Open-Xchange to name a few. Not that I'm against Outllook. It is quite useful, except for the fact that the search functionality leaves a lot to be desired and the pst files really must go.

Zarafa and Kolab already use WebODF for displaying ODF attachments, but not yet for editing. There's also an android app that handles displaying ODF documents by registering to handle the ODF mimetypes.

Actually, this has been done. The most useful progress indicators do the following:

1) Show overall progress
2) Show progress of subprocess
3) Have some type of message display that actually tells us what is happening (in fact having this may be more usefull than showing progress of the subprocesses).

Here are some examples of great progress indicators (granted, not all are installers, but they are informative):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14684652/how-do-create-progress-bar-while-clicking-remove-button-in-nsis

http://doc.zarafa.com/7.0/Migration_Manual/en-US/html/images/MGR_Progress.png

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/Copy_files_with_Progress/copyfiles.jpg

http://help.comodo.com/uploads/Comodo%20Backup/b11a8045cb003891d886ace8f138a534/5eac818f1e1c4adc19d335055b06586b/d871fb826e82b18c4d9d5f28f76278a5/cbu_restore_final1_022012.png

http://openchrom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/openchrom-installer-unpack.jpg?w=640

The last one I want to show is actually from a game I like, and I was having a ton of issues trying to find a screenshot of the progress indicator, so instead, I found a Youtube video. The installer is about 5 minutes in - when you first launch the game, you have a progress indicator, but, its a little dark in this video, in the upper left hand corner, you can see how many files there are, what file it is on, if its downloading or installing, etc. Probably one of the most helpful progress indicators I have ever seen:

http://youtu.be/ROOJFT6ae7M?t=5m2s

If you're not tryign them, you're not really looking.

OpenGroupware is a nonstarter.

"2009-05-17 18:02: OGo Website The OGo website is outdated, we are working on a fix. It will take a while :-) Please join us in one of the mailing lists to discuss OGo and ask any questions you might have."

Zimbra is pay-for-premium features, with prices similar to hosted Exchange. http://www.zimbra.com/products/pricing.html. Zafara has a similar model. http://www.zarafa.com/zarafa-calculator/en

I don't mind paying, but I don't want to pay the same for a work-alike drop in replacement from a small company when Microsoft's *hosted* solution is price-competitive.

Citadel is okay. But IMHO, not comperable to Exchange.

Kolab is on my list of things to try out, but I'm not optimistic. It seems that stable Outlook connectors are proprietary and cost $13.95/seat or $60/year depending on who you buy them from. Otherwise lots of alpha and beta clients http://www.kolab.org/clients

Dollar for dollar, none of these have any advantages over Exchange. Kolab has promise, it doesn't pretend to be an Exchange drop-in replacement, but a FOSS stack alternative. Are you using it in production?

Other semi-open source groupwares that support Outlook either natively or with a plugin: Open-Xchange and Zarafa.

(same AC here)

Zarafa, huh? I just took a look -- based on the comparison chart here, it looks like their 'community' web interface only supports single-user calendars. This would be fine for me, but would totally be a problem if I wanted to set up another account for my wife so we could synchronize our calendars while we're both out at work. It looks like you have to buy their proprietary plug-in to get the multi-user web access front-end. Alas :-/

Am I mistaken? Does their new free calendar application support calendar sharing for multiple users? Enquiring minds want to know... :-)

I am happy with Zarafa Web client on my Mac. The interface has been literally copy-pasted from Outlook, so you will not lose yourself in a new environment. I could also access my e-mail using IMAP or any other standard protocol. Free (community) version comes with 3 licenses for MAPI (real Microsoft Outlook) connections (Windows). Pay version is still cheaper than Microsoft Exchange and allows for up to unlimited Microsoft Outlook connections.

I use Z-Push on my iPod Touch (Microsoft ActiveSync-like technology) and it works like a charm. Overall, good documentation and possible integration with other systems. Available on Ubuntu's package management system - easy to install on some other linux distros.

Have you had a look at Zarafa? It's an open source replacement for exchange which handles email, calendaring and contacts. If you ran a server with this then your co-workers could connect with their favourite mail client/calender app, or use the webclient. It also supports Z-push which works like active sync for use with android and windows mobile devices.

I have an instance of it running on a custom built mythbuntu PVR at home to provide me with something other than google calendar to use with my android.

The downsides: the free community edition has some limits to it's features (eg: no multi-user calendar support), so you may need to fork out a few dollars if you need such.

The only truly private cloud is the one you own, manage and host yourself. For most users this is of course not feasible; they lack the knowledge, time and inclination to set one up. For us tech types however it's getting to the feasible stage.

We have all seen the news about the Raspberry Pi, a dirt cheap mini computer that can run on a handful of AA batterys. Take a linux distro of your choice which runs on the Raspberry Pi, add some lovely open source software like Zarafa, sprinkle lightly with a dynamic DNS and bake for however long you want in a cool Raspberry Pi. Serves an entire household (or more).

For that extra security flavour you can garnish with an OpenVPN connection, and deny all other incomming traffic.

Et voila! Mobile, web accessable email, contacts and calendar (plus whatever else you want to set up on there) with the data being on your machine and in your control.

Thank for mentionning this. But, do you know that you can link on Slashdot?

Zarafa features

It's virtually impossible to replicate the functionality and ease-of-use of gmail. However, I've recently looked into this, and here are my comments (note: I haven't yet implemented any of this, so take this with a large boulder of salt):

* For obvious reasons, you need an IMAP server. Dovecot is among the most compliant and best (my ISP happens to use it :-). Should you want to choose something else, make sure you check out the IMAP server compliancy page.

* For push email on the iPhone, z-push seems to work, and people have gotten it to work with dovecot (note: this is a bit old, and so these instructions might need some tweaking).

* You do, of course need an MTA like postfix or exim, but choosing one may be a matter of personal preference.

* You're unlikely to find a spam filtering solution as good as gmail's (it's crowd-sourced, after all).

* Finding a replacement for gmail filtering rules is a big problem. You'll probably have to go with procmail.

(However, as a programmer, I happen to prefer something with a bit more power and flexibilty, and so I'd probably port over the ancient-but-likely-still-usable "deliver" mail handling program. Deliver takes mail received from postfix, exim, or sendmail and feeds it to a program that you write (a shell script, ruby script, C++ program, or whatever you like). Your program then tells deliver what to do with the message (deliver it normally, refile it, delete it, etc., etc.). Also, since it's a program, you can do behind-the-scenes stuff like saving of attachments, vacation autoreplies, mail archiving, etc., etc.. It's the ultimate in power in flexibility, if you can program.)

However, this still doesn't address the issues of contacts and calendars. Unfortunately, there's no good solution for these:

* You might want to check out Zarafa. The free community version seems decent, as long as you're happy with access via the web or iPhone. Mail filtering capabilities are limited, and you'll have to use Outlook if you want to use a desktop client for contacts or calendars (the free version limits you to three Outlook users). However, Thunderbird might be usable via CalDAV for calendars and z-sync for contacts.

* As others have mentioned, Zimbra is a possibility. However, if you need iPhone support, it appears to be horribly expensive for home use -- as in multiple hundreds of dollars expensive. From that I understand, the Zimbra network edition, starter version is the cheapest iPhone-supporting deal, at ~$400/year or $840 for a perpetual license.

A new major version has been under development alongside PHP 5 for several years. This version was originally planned to be released as PHP 6 as a result of its significant changes, which included plans for full Unicode support. However, Unicode support took developers much longer to implement than originally thought, an the decision was made in March 2010[13] to move the project to a branch, with features still under development moved to a trunk.

PHP currently does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; Unicode support is under development for a future version of PHP and will allow strings as well as class, method, and function names to contain non-ASCII characters.

Initial support for Unicode and multiple character encodings (still buggy as of version 1.9)

Internally, Zarafa uses the windows-1252 charset just about everywhere. This means that we're storing the entire subject, to, from, etc in windows-1252. Only at the moment that the message is converted to an outgoing RTF822 message for SMTP, is the charset conversion done to follow various RFC822 standards.

I have my own bug for this on the Red Hat Bugzilla, which made it blocker for me, but I wonder how somebody could write in the 21st century a groupware server which is capable of working only with windows-1251 charset.

Zafara and Zimbra come pretty close, interface wise, but they are more like web-based MS Outlook-replacements than simple E-mail clients. They are also not simple free hosted webmail, you (or your admin) will have to maintain your own server or pay for them to host it.

E.G. does Zarafa work as an exchange clone on the server for Snow Leopard clients? Or Scalix?

The open source does-it-all collaborative suite programs like Exchange certainly need to be more competitive, but so far they are promising. So, maybe your Exchange-using organization should switch. Two "larger" looking ones I've found are:

Zarafa

Zimbra

Both were just a simple google search away. :P

As for an Exchange client solution, well...difficult, since Microsoft controls the communication interface for that and I doubt at this stage they are interested in freely playing nice with non-Microsoft clients. In that case, your best bet is to change the server.

I take that back, they may be getting enough pressure for playing nice with clients due to the whole .NET + Evolution thing, seems like they might be pushing for it a bit, since Evolution is somewhat working with Exchange. I can at least get email as well as see calendar events and get warnings about them, but sending emails I haven't tried very hard to figure out how to do. Hopefully the push for that isn't some sort of patent backstabbing deal though. Regardless, I'd rather not deal with that patent troll if I can help it and would instead ask for something that at least used standards so that you could use what client you wanted to. Microsoft doesn't know the meaning of the term "standard", plus, you know, there's the whole hatred for Linux and just trying to pull everyone onto their platforms thing so they can "collect at a later date" - Bill Gates.

i love linux as much as everyone else but in reality there isn't a product yet out side of exchange that gives the amount of seemless intgration that exchange gives.

So what's wrong with the following products?
http://www.egroupware.org/
http://www.group-office.com/
http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/
http://www.scalix.com/
http://www.kolab.org/
http://www.opengroupware.org/
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.openconnector.org/
Non-free alternatives:
http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/
http://bynari.net/index.php?id=7
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/
http://www.officecalendar.com/
http://www.samsungcontact.com/
http://www.zarafa.com/
http://www.postpath.com/

I look forward to reading your reply.

I came across Zarafa the other day: Its not OSS but it does seem to be a viable Linux-based alternative to exchange:
http://www.zarafa.com/?q=en/content/products

(I'm not associated with product or comapny)

Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements? Lack of such is one of the most frequently cited reasons for MS's continued dominance in the enterprise, because while there are trivial replacements for Windows, IE, Office and Outlook, replacing Exchange has been a show-stopper for a lot of places.

This one was mentioned on /. a couple months ago: http://www.zarafa.com/

Quotas anyone? OWA?

TFS even mentions web access.. and a PDF of the full feature list is available from the link from the summary. It mentions quotas, web access with full calendar support etc. You should do a bit more research before starting with the nay-saying.

As for MOSS, Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Project Server, etc I don't use them and have no intention of every doing so. Do you not get that this is for people who want to move away from Microsoft products? There are alternatives available.

I expect that this would work with AD and group policy stuff, I don't see how it could work without it really. If you're that interested, go try it out yourself and then give a proper review rather than just complaining without looking into it. It sounds to me like it would be a good drop in replacement for a lot of small to medium businesses (the one where I work included), all we really need is email, calendar freebusy stuff and DirectPUSH for it to be a drop in replacement.

Before this even posted, I was told by one of the Slashdot Editors (?) that I could use Zarafa; I installed and quickly realized it was a replacement for the Exchange server. This may fix the problem of needing Exchange at all, but my problem is that I've been forced to use Exchange; I need a client that will talk to that server from my Linux box.

Also: I have a VM, and it works fine... it's on another box at my desk. My problem is that I want to use something that runs on Linux. Even if it's run through WINE... I haven't looked into using Outlook '03 under WINE yet, I'll admit.

http://zarafa.com/

Their prices are in Euros - once you get done converting that to US dollars a suitable replacement (Professional with 200 users) would cost my company approximately $8,400.

For reference:
http://www.zarafa.com/?q=en/content/prices
http://www.zarafa.com/content/versions

I can get Exchange 2007 and the additional 100 new CALS I need to be in compliance for less than $7,000.

Doesn't seem like a good deal to me other than helping break the Microsoft monopoly in this segment. Sadly my corporate over lords won't see it that way and tell me to stick to Exchange since it is at least $1,400 cheaper in the US.

Their prices are in Euros - once you get done converting that to US dollars a suitable replacement (Professional with 200 users) would cost my company approximately $8,400.

For reference:
http://www.zarafa.com/?q=en/content/prices
http://www.zarafa.com/content/versions

I can get Exchange 2007 and the additional 100 new CALS I need to be in compliance for less than $7,000.

Doesn't seem like a good deal to me other than helping break the Microsoft monopoly in this segment. Sadly my corporate over lords won't see it that way and tell me to stick to Exchange since it is at least $1,400 cheaper in the US.

Its only free for 3 users or less.

And even that version has tons of things you dont get.

It's crippleware, and fairly pointless crippleware too. What is the use of an open-source email server that is only open-source and free for = 3 users?

Quotas anyone?

Yes

> OWA?

Web access, yes, full functionality unlike OWA.

> Drop in replacement, you say?

Yes RTFA, or the submission title.

>Will MOSS or CRM play with it?

Any "Customer Relationship Management" software designed to work with it, will, just like exchange...Oh you mean will Microsoft's OWN exchange add ons work with a competitors replacement, not a serious question is it, they barely work with their own products. They said its was a replacement for exchange, Not Microsoft' entire won't play well with others product line.

> Will it pick up AD rules and GPOs?

Last I checked exchange 2007 didn't even integrate properly into AD, I don't see why anything else should.

> What about BCM and Project Server?

BCM is a terrible excuse to install SQL server on client workstations for no purpose, and adds little functionality. I have been asked to remove it, but I have never been asked to install it. Project is ok I guess if you want to hire someone to maintain it full time, Projects servers inability to interoperate with any standards bases mail servers is a fault of Project server, not the other products.

>OR, is it just another glorified POP/IMAP box?

No, it speaks pop/imap/smtp/LDAP/openldap whatever outlook uses and several others , All PROPERLY unlike exchange, in addition it works other MTA agents Zarafa didn't write, also unlike exchange.

>I read the feature set from the web site.

No it does not seem like you did. Try again http://download.zarafa.com/zarafa/en/Featureslist620.pdf

>I know Exchange,

No it does not seem like you do.

>I was in the original product group way back when.

Ah bias, please disclose more, were you head of standards compliance ?

>This AINT no DROP IN REPLACEMENT.

Your correct at last, anything that can replace exchanges functionality that is well designed would be a huge improvement, Its hardly fair to call it a replacement, It should be called a drop in upgrade.

>But people should watch their words.

Pot, Kettle.

>Side by side against Exchange 2007, it would not be a fair fight.

Exchange 2003 Side by side, against exchange 2007, isn't a fair fight, exchange 2003 is far easier to deploy, use, maintain, manage, repair, upgrade, learn, and it integrates with AD properly ! Exchange 2007 is as terrible an upgrade option for mail servers as Vista is for workstations, and don't even get me started on 2008 server or MS Virtual server. I suppose you were so busy clicking ok to UAC prompts that you failed to notice things Microsoft had to do to move exchange 2007 like bundle exchange 2003 and matching exchange 2003 licenses for free.

I will be trying this out, but given the size of the download, I don't expect much more than email.

And you shouldn't. You don't even get shared calendars in the free version, which is arguably one of the big reasons people use Exchange to begin with.

You missed the fact they aren't public folders in the same vein as Exchange public folders:

from the feature doc

http://download.zarafa.com/zarafa/en/Featureslist620.pdf

"Public folders Keep a central calendar and contact folders wo(sic) which everbody has access"

In Exchange, Public folders can of course maintain central calendar, contact, mail, document etc repositories. They also can be mail enabled (you can send and receive email between properly configured public folders) and can have business intelligence processing performed on objects they receive, via forms. This includes creating new forms, forwarding new messages, email replies, interaction with other public folders and THEIR forms etc etc. Public folders in Exchange can essentially perform business processing without human interaction beyond creating the forms (and troubleshooting them when they fail ;)

Sorry. I am sad to report that Microsoft appears to have nothing to fear.

That's exactly what they did: http://www.zarafa.com/content/versions

Real question is: 'why haven't we heard of it before?'

Maybe i'm not good enough with Google, Freshmeat, and the like. I have been looking around for a decent Exchange-replacement for several months, and never encountered Zarafa before.

Are they good enough or is it just another open-source project that's gonna die in the egg?

Not until Q4 2008

From the features pdf

http://download.zarafa.com/zarafa/en/Featureslist620.pdf

"Integration with the Blackberry Enterprise Server to get email, calendar items, contacts and tasks real-time on your Blackberry. Available Q4 2008"