Kolab Summit 2015 Announced

First time accepted submitter stilborne writes The Kolab Collaboration Suite, the open source groupware system that scales from "Raspberry PI" installations to 100k+ seat enterprise deployments, has been adopted by companies and governments around the world, making it one of most successful "poster children" for Free Software and Open Standards. In order to chart the next steps forward, the Kolab community has announced the inaugural Kolab Summit to be held in The Hague on May 2-3, 2015. Along with workshops, BoFs and coding break-out sessions, presentations will be given by key developers from a number of open source projects including Kolab, Roundcube, cyrus imap, and KDE among others. Registration is free, and the call for presentations is live for the next few weeks.

Comments

Mormonism

[Great Big Bird]

I thought it was a conference on Mormonism for a moment.

Re:Groupware?

[RanceJustice]

Though some consider it an antiquated term in the days of social media, "groupware" typically refers to integrative software for enabling / scheduling communication and collaboration, typically client/server based and often in business settings. Email and instant messaging, calendar and task assignment/scheduling/reminders, PIM / address book, file sharing, sync etc... that all work together are typically involved in groupware solutions. Novell GroupWise, Outlook / Exchange, Zimbra, Google Mail / Apps for business etc... are some of the big names people recognize and offer different levels of support and solutions.

There are also several FLOSS a projects that fall into this category, with Kolab being one that is well integrated and supported.

Does anyone actually use this?

[HBI]

I was trying it out, to get off of gmail. Both the binary client and the web service. I found the user experience was pretty bad and it was slow. Also, the mail client on Windows had a lot of runtime errors.

I was wondering if anyone actually used it and was happy with it. I certainly am not.

Re:Does anyone actually use this?

[rdnetto]

I've been using it for little over a year (for the same reason as you - didn't want to put too much info into Google), and would describe it as half-decent. I use it as a diary, essentially - schedule, calender, todo list, etc. I still use Gmail for actual email though, because unless you own the domain outright (i.e. not a subdomain) you can trigger false positives for spam on other servers that results in you mail being dropped.

Pros:
-open source
-free (gratis)
-works

Cons:
-pain to setup - the target audience is sysadmins, so you really need to practice doing it in a VM first (especially since doing a complete uninstall is non-trivial)
-buggy - every time I've upgraded to a new version, I've run into a significant bug. (Inability to handle apostrophes in names, buggy apache module that keeps crashing the server, etc.) You can usually fix it if you know PHP/Python, but it's still a pain that makes for a poor user experience. (I've submitted bug reports with patches for these, but not all of them have been merged.)

Basically, it does take a lot of effort to get it working (I have 500 lines of notes on it), but once you've done that it will keep working pretty reliably. The official client is KDE Kontact, which works great for me since I use Linux anyway. I can see it working out poorly if your OS is Windows though (KDE for Windows isn't stable yet). It syncs well with Android too. I generally prefer to enter important events, etc. in through the webui though, since I don't quite trust the other clients to sync them properly.

tldr; it's probably the most broken piece of software I've used under Linux, but it works well enough that I continue to do so. I wouldn't recommend it for anything important (e.g. actual business use), but it's fine for non-critical personal use.

Join the mailing list

[certain death]

Kolab is a pipe dream, it suffers from a lack of documentation, leadership and upgradability. Install it and successfully get it running, with a single domain, then when the time comes to upgrade, you may as well just build a new server. Upgrades break EVERYTHING. Undocumented changes from version to version. Nearly any modern (since about 1996) email server can handle multiple virtual domains...Kolab can't, and there isn't any kind of drive from the project to make it any easier to do. It would cut into the competition for their email service if it were made easy. Stick with iRedmail and get a faster, better email server built from nearly the exact components.

Re:Join the mailing list

[Shaman]

I'm afraid this is true, at the moment. Kolab has never been a workable or even working project, in my opinion. Which is really, really sad.

Re:Join the mailing list

[rdnetto]

Kolab supports multi-domain, in fact even ASP multi-tenancy, environments. And seamless updates and upgrades are part of the enterprise values it provides under support. But naturally one needs to know what they are doing. This is a complex micro-service architecture that is more powerful than virtually any of the competitors. But that power comes at the cost of loads of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.

I think is simultaneously the best thing and the second biggest issue[1] about Kolab - it's a very powerful piece of software targeted at sysadmins. You can setup some very complex, enterprise grade configurations with it, but to do that you need to be willing to muck around with postfix, etc. By that same note, you need to have at least basic familiarity with postfix, apache, cyrus, etc. to actually set it up in the first place, which sets the bar fairly high. (I think it took me a week of practicing in a VM before I was ready to do a proper deployment on my home server.)

[1] The biggest issue would be its general bugginess. e.g. This bug affects anyone with an apostrophe in their name, but went untouched for over a year, despite a patch being included in the original submission.

"a" and "m"

[Tablizer]

Single letters make a difference there too: It's "Moronism".

Re:Groupware?

[rdnetto]

Actually, it's an email server, except it's not just email - there's also contacts, calendars, to do lists, etc. It's basically a direct competitor to Microsoft Exchange, but with a FOSS stack. I have it installed on my home server, and it works pretty well.