When looking at the requirements 200-500 users - I cannot imagine any
practically useful scenario without single sign on solution al least across
the web services and centralized group/access control.
With 200-500 users there would be fair amount of user and access management
workload. This needs to be distributed to data owners/managers/leaders.
That is beside the already mentioned associated storage, backup, security
and disaster recovery management.
There are other companies beside G-company providing these kind of services
or enterprise level support. Some examples: Kolab, Nextcloud, Collabora,
...
Regardless of solution chosen - someone has to manage it full time. Given
the number of users - it is critical - hence it needs more than one
individual to cover for vacation/sickness/disasters/etc.
Just adding to the list of consideration. Do look up the services mentioned
above though. They work like G-company, but they are OSS, and the platforms
are deployable and manageable by individuals - so the lock-in is not as
strong as with proprietary services.
Tomas
On Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 7:13 AM Tyrell Jentink wrote:
> It's been several years since I looked into this... Like others have said,
> the administrative overhead is substantial, and I ultimately decided that
> it was just easier and more reliable (for my needs) to use Google.
>
> That said... The top product I was looking at at the time was Kolab,
> http://kolab.org, and it SEEMS to meet many of your requirements...
>
> I consider it unlikely that a company of this size would be served by any
> single application... If I were setting up Kolab for a client, a good
> amount of energy would have to be put into questions like "How do we manage
> users?" And "How do we manage storage?" And "How do we manage backups?"
>
> Like, maybe you will find that managing lots of users pushes you into
> needing an LDAP server, possibly with Single Signon. As you add these
> "Supporting" services, your security footprint increases, and you may need
> additional firewall and intrusion detection software; Maybe these services
> should be on "Bastion Servers," individual servers for each service to
> increase both performance and security... Maybe you virtualized some.
>
> Maybe those questions lead to non-Linux answers... Maybe you find managing
> the workstations of all those users works best with ActiveDirectory rather
> than OpenLDAP; Maybe you find that managing the storage requires something
> more robust than LVM on XFS or EXT4... And then is Kolab's file sharing
> (WebDAV, if I remember correctly) enough for your users? Adding SMB and NFS
> can have unintended complications.
>
> And all of those questions have to be balanced against the inherent feature
> creep that comes from wandering down this road.
>
> For many companies, the answer is to simply let Someone Else do it...
> Often, that Someone Else is Google.
>
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 13:40 logical american
> wrote:
>
> > Hello again:
> >
> > Can anyone suggest a linux system server which will successfully do the
> > following?
> >
> > 1. successfully imitate and replace the Google Groups program
> > 2. successfully imitate and replace the Google gmail server
> > 3. allow Google drive operations or simulate those operations
> >
> > I am seeking to move a large group of users (200-500) from Google Groups
> > and gmail over to a stand-alone server and provide some type of Google
> > drive functionality also for them, but at a bare minimum a common area
> > to download files must exist so users can store their files.
> >
> > What would you suggest?
> >
> > The users are in the public domain.
> >
> > Thanks for the input
> >
> > - Randall
> >
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