Groupware roundup #1
As e-mail, communication and exchange seems to be growing rapidly it is interesting to spot some of the novelty's on the market.
One of these novelties in my opinion is the recent rise (or expansion) of linux based groupware solutions. For an impressions here's an -incomplete- list with the most popular groupware solutions, and their (dis) advantages:
- eGroupware - flexible, opensource and a complete solution but a pain to install and maintain due to absence of installer packages that actualy work correctly with mailsupport
- Kolab - versatile, fully expandable, fully opensource but the lack of good documentation make it a pain in the ass to even try to install
- Open-Xchange - supported, nicely documented but partly closed source and a pricey solution even compared to exchange!
- Zimbra - very good support, active community and a free personal version available but pricey solution when implementing and the current development seems to be slacking in supporting new linux distributions
- Scalix - currently the most promising solutions, very good documentation and active community, free personal version available including outlook connector, but missing debian/ubuntu packages as well as a resource hogger due to the java architecture
- Group-Office - very nice interface, good standard documentation, cheap license model but administration is quite limited in options, meaning you will have to edit a lot of files manualy (for instance when setting up a smarthost)
- Citadel - easy to use and install groupware, fully opensource, fast usuage and lightweight but interface will not appeal to everyone and administration seems to be cluttered
THis is by no means a complete list, but gives you an impression of whats available, possible and impossible 
.
For all solutions, howver, it seems to be a real problem to get a good and fast working outlook connection supporting addressbook, calendar, notes and e-mail like exchange provides. The one supporting this as one of the best compared to its cost will be Scalix, as their "Premium Users" include the outlook connector acting as exchange component working really well and fast.
However as I said before, sclaix does not seems to have any debian or ubuntu based packages (debs) and instead o this they release a manual solution. As always with popular packages someone tries to find a better solution for this and so did Rene Hadler. He created a python based solution for installing scalix on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Ubuntu 8.10 and Debian 4 (etch). This solutions works brilliantly, but for most of the users the german language makes it hard to understand the installer, and that's where I came in. Now there is a fully translated version of this scalix installer available, and because Rene Hadler's website seems to be on and off I will provide a mirror here including instructions on the installation. So click on the link below for complete instructions and a mirror to the installer.
Install a base sytem, no GUI and setup your base components like apache, php, mysql, webmin etc. Make sure you do this before installing scalix, as scalix can (and probably will) break some dependencies.
Install a couple of essential tools needed later in the installation, python, unzip and screen
Now dowload the latest (11.4.3) scalix community release from www.scalix.com to a temporary location (ie /tmp) using screen (wget the file, then press ctrl + a followed by d to return to the base terminal)
Download the scalix python installer from http://www.davidbezemer.nl/downloads/pyscalix.zip
Extract the scalix installer using "unzip ./pyscalix.zip"
Now start the installation using "python scalix_install_deb.py" and follow on-screen instructions
Now your installation is complete, reboot and login to your newly installed scalix using "<hostname or ip>/sac" and you are ready to go.
Additional hints and tricks that I used contain setting up a smarthost, using fetchmail for external accounts and including spamfiltering and virusscanning using ClamAV and Spamassassin, for more info look at the below links.
- http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos/SpamAssassin
- http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuring_Clamav_Ubuntu_Gutsy
- http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuring_Sendmail_with_smarthost_Ubuntu_Gutsy
- http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=HowTos/Fetchmail
So far for this roundup, next month or so I will be back with more information on this scalix project, and comparing it to some other groupware packages, untill then try this out and let me know your results!
Cheerio, David
May 18th, 2009 - 18:59
Hi David
You seemed to have missed out the Gordano Messaging Suite which is one of the better Exchange alternatives, runs on just about all flavors of Linux, but also supports Windows, AIX and Solaris. You can read a comprehensive article about why the Gordano Messaging Suite is a viable alternative on eWeek here http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Microsofts-Exchange-Isnt-the-Only-Way-to-Get-the-Message-Out/
May 18th, 2009 - 19:18
As this is only a first groupware roundup, I might want to take a look at it for the next comparison round.
At the eweek article I get the idea that the costs for gordano are really high, at a staggering $150+ per user, which makes exchange a lot cheaper alternative from 50 and onwards.
As the website of gordano seems to be hestitant to give any clear info on this matter, can you elaborate?
May 24th, 2009 - 19:05
Hi, nice posts there
hold responsible’s exchange for the gripping information
June 2nd, 2009 - 17:25
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.
June 19th, 2009 - 23:04
hi there, I’m running Scalix 11.4.3 with Debian (Etch) but don’t get Scalix to work with SSL via mod_rewrite. Do you have a proper work around for thia?
June 23rd, 2009 - 14:37
you should be able to without using mod_rewrite module as described on the scalix wiki. (http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuring_Scalix_on_https_Ubuntu_Gutsy)
Did you install the ssl mod using a2enmod ssl? The link above should work perfectly on debian/ubuntu as I just verified here.
August 4th, 2009 - 15:04
Hi David,
The price quoted at $150+ in the eweek article is for 25 users or less, if you read on you will see as user counts ramp up the price reduces coming down to around $20 per user for 10,000 accounts. The Gordano Messaging Suite is cheaper than Exchange (and any of its mainstream competitors) by a sizable margin especially in larger installations. When you factor in the fact that it requires much less management overhead, is multi platform, and much more scalable than Exchange there are huge cost savings to be made.