[K12OSN] OT - Open-Xchange

[Mike Ely]

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We're using Zimbra here, too.  I moved to it from a somewhat shaky
exim/postfix setup midyear, partly in response to user demand for
free-busy scheduling etc.

So far, my experience has been mixed.  First off, they really, REALLY
prefer RHEL as the base distro, although they're also supporting SLES.
Personally, I'd greatly prefer a Debian version with vendor support, but
c'est la vie.

I'd agree with Calvin that you want to dedicate a machine to it, or as
in our case give it a fairly beefy vmware partition.  Once running, it's
pretty nice - uses our existing LDAP server for auth, and the ajax-y
features are actually pretty slick, although they load considerably
slower than, say, squirrelmail.

Shared folder/calendar access via Outlook plugin comes this summer
supposedly - a feature which sadly is needed to gain more heavy usage
amongst the people with initials after their names.  I'm looking forward
to training staff on that before school starts this fall.

All in all, I'd give it a qualified thumbs-up.  Plusses are: school
district discounts, powerful and easy-to-use administrative tools,
excellent web client, decent spam filtering, all built on open-source
software, and very good tech support.  Minuses: too redhatty, slower web
client, and Outlook integration isn't quite done.

Hope that helps,
Mike

Calvin Dodge wrote:
> On 7/13/06, Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net> wrote:
>> Another one you might look at is Zimbra, www.zimbra.com.  It's all
>> browser-based, with a
>> lot of AJAX so that it seems similar to working with dedicated mail
>> clients.  They have
>> a free open source version.  The advantage of Open-Xchange is that it
>> works with
> 
> The business I work for has been using the open source version for
> some months now.  It seems to work fine for us - using AJAX to mimic
> some of the functionality of Outlook (scheduling, address book, etc>)
> It recognizes and responds to Outlook schedule requests, putting
> accepted requests in the calendar.
> 
> If you decide to use Zimbra, be sure to use a sufficiently powerful
> system (I'd suggest at least 1 GHz and 512 megs of RAM, since my first
> test system (400 MHz) was unbearably slow).
> 
> It's simplest to dedicate a machine to Zimbra, since it occupies mail
> and web ports (for the web-based access), so don't plan to add it to
> an existing web server (it CAN be done, but you're really better off
> with a dedicated Zimbra server.
> 
> Feel free to email me off-list if you have any other questions about
> Zimbra.
> 
> Calvin Dodge
> 
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