Hello Michael,
See my responses below.
I am working for an IT service provider in eastern Switzerland.
Currently we are evaluating group ware solutions for small to middle
size office (3-50 employees). SOGo looks very promising from a
technical perspective but also because of the native Outlook support.
As a matter of fact good support for Outlook is mandatory among our
customers. I have played around a bit and have some questions which
might help us in our decision:
1. SOGo itself seems to be solid and easy to deploy if you have a
working email setup. Our own experiences so far are very good and I
know of very big installations as at University of Konstanz and other
German universities which prove that it can handle huge amounts of
users and scales well. But unfortunately OpenChange and Samba4 seem to
be at least less straightforward. We tried compiling them and SOGo
from different source versions, compiling them and using the prebuilt
packages for SOGo and using the inverse packages for samba as well as
SOGo. I never got the Outlook integration to work properly. As I don't
have many experiences with these softwares components it's hard to
tell if it's due to misconfiguration or due to a not working
combination of package versions or other side effects. Which is the
preferred way to install SOGo+Samba4+OpenChange? OS is flexible, we
would prefer Debian 7 but we use Ubuntu 12.04 for SOGo at the moment
because it seems better supported. RHEL6 is also well known here.
We provide packages for Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04 and CentOS so you should
use what you prefer the most.
2. The OpenChange Cookbook suggest to install an OpenLDAP server?
What's the benefit of that compared to using the Samba4 directory? It
seems to be redundant and adds complexity.
OpenLDAP isn't required. You could use Samba4 exclusively.
3. Many tutorials suggest that you select "Always ask for credentials"
in the Outlook configuration options for the Exchange connection. With
ZEG it seems to work without that option and it would be kind of a
show stopper the user had to handle that credential dialog every time
she starts Outlook. For which scenarios is this option necessary and
what are the drawbacks of not selecting it?
If the machine is joined to the domain and the AD username/password is
the same as the one required for Outlook, password prompt won't be required.
4. What options for professional support are there? Is it always on a
per need base or are there any support or licensing plans?
It depends on what kind of support you're looking for. Free support is
offered on this mailing list, we well as commercial support packages
from sogo.nu.
5. Although it is our first experience with Samba4 it seems promising
and the combination of a Samba4 domain and SOGo/OpenChange as an
Exchange replacement seems to be a great concept for small businesses.
Is it possible for the OpenChange server to join an existing Samba4
domain and use its directory? Any experiences with that setup?
It is possible but we haven't yet tested it. It's in our TODO list for
this week so we'll report our findings later.
Thanks,
--
Ludovic Marcotte
[email protected] :: +1.514.755.3630 :: http://inverse.ca
Inverse inc. :: Leaders behind SOGo (http://sogo.nu) and PacketFence
(http://packetfence.org)
--
[email protected]
https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
