How should I allow mail, calendar and contact syncs?
Posted by Cxms on Tue 25 Aug 2009 at 14:15
I'm looking to create a Exchange-type server where users can have their Desktop, Laptop & iPhone contacts, calendars, notes, & email all synced automatically.
It will be a small office type server housed locally for 10-20 people max.
Do users here have any suggestions at the software I should be using, or the setup required?
Thanks in advance.
SOGo gives all the docs that you need to get it running. (Although they are more geared to RedHat, they do provide a Debian report.)
http://www.scalableogo.org/english/downloads/backend.html
https://www.forge.funambol.org/download/
I have had it running for about 30 users on CentOS on a P4 but have not yet tried the Debian packages.
Cheers,
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Do you mean using the Funambol server as a middleware between SOGo and the mobile clients using the SOGo connector or using "plain" SOGo plus the Funambol client?
Did you test this with contacts stored on LDAP or just database?
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We used Funambol just for its SymcML connectivity.
Everything else, including shared private address books (for teams) and resource reservation (laptops, meeting rooms etc) was provided by SOGo and we even had assistants for staff!
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What do you mean "scalix.com is a commercial solution that does not keep control locally"? Scalix is a mail server product which you can install on your local mail server. There are both community and commercial editions.
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We are using it on debian etch platform and it works like a charm (sharing mail, calendar, contacts, notes, sync with iphones over the air, outlook integration (not free), web interface outlook like..)
I've had several contacts with the support team wich have been very fast at answering and correcting problems i've encountered.
PS : sorry for my poor english as i'm french.
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A leftover from my month in Paris.
Is this available via apt-get? I cannot find it listed or in search.
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By the way, I'm moving away my company from Zarafa (running on Etch too) because we endured so many terrible bugs (like: updates that fail in the middle of altering the database leaving it trashed and all mails unavailables, automatic store deletion when it had a ldap access problem, mangles every mail not encoded in western charsets - no support for unicode -, Outlooks clients crashing all the time...).
Also storing everything in a (single) database looks (retrospectively) like a huge design mistake (non balancable load...), esp when the schema is totaly opaque (they almost dump things mapping Microsoft MAPI forms, with many undocumented binary columns acceded through bolean expressions and "magic numbers" in the "community edition"s sources...). As opposed to plain traditional stores in mailboxes/maildirs (which are easy to spread on multiple servers, are easy to restore manually, to backup incrementaly, are standards and compatible with other tools, etc).
But grand parent post is right, they reacted swiftly when we reported those bugs.
Since Zarafa experience I completely lost trust in those larges, all-in-one groupware solutions, and am migrating to plain IMAP and Webcal ; but Zimbra (for instance, and to a lesser extent OBM and Scalix) looks much saner than Zarafa. (ps. also from Paris ;).
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I suggest you OBM (http://www.obm.org/).
OBM is written using LAMP (but you can use/I suggest you PostgreSQL), Perl and JAVA. Mailer is based on Postfix+Cyrus+openLDAP. Synchronization is available for Thunderbird/Lightning, Outlook (non free plugin) and lots of Phone (using SyncML).
Debian packages are available.
Funambol IPhone support is poor, it implement his own calendar and synchronize it, not official IPhone calendar. IPhone official calendar synchronization is only available via ActiveSync.
For now, OBM doesn't synchronize IPhone, but ActiveSync is under development.
You can use their mailist for more informations.
Bye
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Thanks for your comment though.
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Thanks
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http://www.zimbra.com/community/downloads.html
It has all you need but iPhone sync. But if you sync your Iphone via iTunes on Mac you get everything via Calenda, Contact and so on. Almost awesome.
The new 6.0 release will be on 31/8-2009
Joakim Nordberg
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Is it a modual you buy once and add in?
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-Is it apt-get or a seperate install?
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http://www.kerio.com/mailserver
It offers all what you requested (debian package, iPhone support, Outlook Offline Connector) + very simple and straightforward administration. You can download trial version.
Best reagards
Pavel
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And I can assure you that your users will love it. Calendars, mail and Docs play very nice in corp environment. All these have offline mode, if you afraid to lose internet connection.
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Still think the idea of giving Google control of a big communication line in a business could be a mistake. But I want to check all options.
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As for the privacy, Google complies with SOX and many other regulations, and you can read from their statements that they under no circumstances can read your email or something.
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As far as I can tell iPhones don't support SyncML which is the only supported sync method with the groupware server. If you get SyncML working this might be what you are looking for.
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See: http://www.group-office.com
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I'm using more or less your same environment (eGroupware 1.6.002 with addressbook on LDAP and funambol client for SyncML to Windows ME 6 on mobile devices) but I had no success with regards to SyncML and addressbook (it seems to manage calendar fine). Any hints?
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OBM looks quite impressive as well. I might give that a try for future use perhaps. Anyone experience with OBM in regards to Egroupware?
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I wonder what solution you will go with.
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what you need is zarafa , + z-push, and optional 2way synchronizing your contacts, appointments to for example sugarcrm, done with z-merge.
the forum is good and support is also. 3 user free mapi connections ( outlook )
z-push is used for mobile devices to sync ( webserver needed).
I'm running it with 25 users now, database of 36Gb, and still adding users, going up to 70 ;-) ,
You can uses imap and pop also or from within zarafa or use other pop-imap servers. im running dovecot with it for my "to migrate" users..
it also has a nice webinterface, 1 normal, 1 for mobile devices.
for mobiles, im having here Nokia e90 and n71, several htc devices, and 3 iphones, android is also possible, but no android tested here..
and it all pretty easy to configure.
hoop this helps.. for me i like zarafa.
more info www.zarafa.com
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