Amos Shapira wrote:
Last time I tried to look at openXchange (in order to learn about an
exchange alternative when I hoped I'll be asked for it) it looked a pretty
complicated task to set it up. Is this true or did I get the wrong
impression?
And as Dvir asked already - does anyone here have true real-life experience
setting up and using any of these solutions to report about?
I've installed all three, in order to test them. I haven't actually used
them in production, or for very long in the test environment.
Of them all, I would recommend Scalix, as the best documented and
easiest to install.
Scalix is pretty easy - assuming you stick to their supported platform
(RHEL & Xandros). The downloaded file contains an installer that
basically verifies that your system is "approved", and then installs a
set of RPM files, and walks you through the basic configuration. If you
don't stick to what they support, you can still install the RPM files
manually, but it ain't fun.
*. Their web based client refused to work with Debian's iceweasel,
based on the user agent browser identification, but when I changed the
user agent to Firefox everything worked. The forums have a note on this,
saying that scalix consider iceweasel to be a separate platform that
they don't QA and don't support.
*. Scalix uses PAM for authenticating users - I was able to easily
configure it to work with my LDAP and Kerberos services.
The difficulty with Open-Xchange is the set of prerequisites on the
system. Assuming you get these right, open-xchange itself isn't that
hard to get working. Open-Xchange builds on lots of other stuff, and (at
least the 0.8 community edition) doesn't provide an easy way to control
all of these services. To set it up, you need to setup the following
(not the current version - I tried out the previous [0.8] version and
things seem to have changed with the latest version [hyperion]) :
*. Java (1.5 at least)
*. MySQL
*. Tomcat
*. Apache web server
*. AJP13 connector (to configure Apache to front for Tomcat)
*. Cyrus (or any other IMAP server, but they recommend Cyrus). I
actually used Courier, but I missed out on some features - I couldn't
get OX to support server-side mail rules with Courier.
*. Postfix
*. Any LDAP server. I used the slapd server provided with Debian,
and had issues with configuring the ACLs correctly for it.
Open-Xchange provides a set of command-line utilities to add/remove
users and generally administrate it. I found them very uncomfortable
(again, version 0.8, not the current version on which I have no
knowledge) - they *must* be run as root, or they don't work correctly,
and for no good reason - they simply update the OX database and the LDAP
server.
All in all, it was a pain to setup, and the outlook connector wreaked
havoc on my test machine - it crashed my outlook box until one of the
developers was able to help me find a missing registry key, after which
it sort-of nearly worked - the main issue was setting permissions on the
collaboration calendar in Outlook so that it would be useful.
Specifically, setting the permissions didn't always work, and a shared
calendar wasn't always shared correctly. Also, one of my test users
blamed the OX outlook connector for loosing some of his contacts and his
messing his backup PST. This allegation wasn't proved or disproved up
until the time came to stop checking OX - it didn't happen when I could
see it.
The web site for the current version seems to indicate that they
simplified the prerequisites and added a community installation script.
Maybe things are better now in the OX world...
OpenGroupware.org: (I tried this out a really long time ago (around the
beginning of 2005), you might want to recheck, to see if anything has
changed.)
The OpenGroupware.org installation is a set of DEB files. Installation
wasn't difficult, however, I didn't keep the OGo system installed long -
I ran into an issue where the web-based UI couldn't be easily configured
to have a work-week start on Sunday. I didn't try to integrate it into
my system, because (at least for my company) the work-week can't start
on Monday, and Friday isn't a work-day.
The prerequisites are PostgreSQL and Apache, and OGo has its own
connector to the actual OGo service, installed as an apache module that
is very weak on documentation, called mod_ngoweb .
This was actually a second issue - documentation about required
maintenance and configuration was very thin - a lot of my time was spent
on searching for clues on how to configure stuff.
OGo seems to be in perpetual beta - things tend to break between
versions, and upgrades seem to be hard to do (judging from the web).
Hope this helps,
Lior
Thanks,
--Amos
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