RE: Exchange server alternative?
I am very skeptical of cloud offerings. I run my own e-mail server at home using Citadel on SL6, which does do calendaring and e-mail, but I don't use calendaring. It's integrated in the web UI, but the UI is pretty 90sish. I would recommend staying away from Office365 / Microsoft's cloud e-mail service. The two organizations where I know people who have moved to it both find it far inferior to previous in-house e-mail with more frequent downtime and unexplained hours long e-mail lags almost weekly. There are plenty of e-mail services available, and I would probably have gone with Rackspace e-mail if I didn't want to cheaply host multiple e-mail addresses at home (the cost is not prohibitive for a business however... It's really not prohibitive for a home user either, just running a server is cheaper for my situation for personal e-mail). -- James Pulver CLASSE Computer Group Cornell University -Original Message- From: owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov [mailto:owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov] On Behalf Of Paul Robert Marino Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2014 12:27 PM To: Nico Kadel-Garcia Cc: Steven Haigh; SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS@FNAL.GOV Subject: Re: Exchange server alternative? Nico I tend to agree with you there are so many inexpensive mail services out there now I haven't tried to do this kind of thing in many years. But its not an option for every one especially it you work for a large company then it can still be cheaper to do it in house or depending on the industry your company is involved in there may be regulatory reasons why SAAS is not an option for any thing considered a document of record like email. On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia nka...@gmail.com wrote: I've not tried that particular tool. I can only say good luck, we've seen that tried many times now. We don't need yet *another* attempt at a drop-in replacement. Break the cycle, and save some money and improve workflow at the same time. Email and messaging are now available as very effective SAAS products, and you don't need to manage your own SL based systems to provide excellent quality services. Save the infrastructure requirements for service that *do* need in-house support. Developer workstations, Beowulf clusters, proprietary data backups, web services for your own applications. On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Paul Robert Marino prmari...@gmail.com wrote: have you looked at openchange http://www.openchange.org/index.html It's been a few years since I looked at it but the goal is to create a exchange server replacement.
Re: Exchange server alternative?
On Monday 10 February 2014 13:32:01 James M. Pulver wrote: I am very skeptical of cloud offerings. I run my own e-mail server at home using Citadel on SL6, which does do calendaring and e-mail, but I don't use calendaring. It's integrated in the web UI, but the UI is pretty 90sish. I would recommend staying away from Office365 / Microsoft's cloud e-mail service. The two organizations where I know people who have moved to it both find it far inferior to previous in-house e-mail with more frequent downtime and unexplained hours long e-mail lags almost weekly. There are plenty of e-mail services available, and I would probably have gone with Rackspace e-mail if I didn't want to cheaply host multiple e-mail addresses at home (the cost is not prohibitive for a business however... It's really not prohibitive for a home user either, just running a server is cheaper for my situation for personal e-mail). I would add that gmail is a bit of a pain, at least initially when migrating large amounts of mail from Exchange. One organization I work for switched a few months ago and I'm still having weird issues where gmail's not-exactly- IMAP service reflects gobs of email in the IMAP client's inbox from time to time that is supposedly old/archived. Once that happens it all shows in the web interface and in the client that way. Its also odd that gmail seems incapable of actually telling you how much mail you have from the web interface -- reports are wildly inaccurate approximations, and with large volumes specific entries will appear at one time and not at others, as if the backend is of the eventually consistent variety. Not sure the origin of this strangeness, but its unnerving to not know volume counts for things like compute farm notifications and really annoying to have 9000 emails that were supposed to have been filtered previously just appear in the inbox at random, requiring manual running of a filter (which sucks over IMAP at that volume) and this happens in Thunderbird, Kmail and the Opera client, so it seems not to be a problem on that end. The calendars thing is... well, not anything that can integrate with a serious project management tool, so its useless for my purposes, so I can't speak to that. Office 365 is simply insufficient for editing of largish documents (technical-spec length -- which is precisely the sort of thing you need collaboration support for). Google docs has the same problem, but does a little better if you run your browser on an overpowered gaming rig -- which is ridiculous when it is remembered that the task at hand is just editing a document in most cases... I'm not trying to bash the concept of some of these services, and for those with lighter needs (probably most people) I'm sure things work just fine. But for those with more serious needs the situation still seems to favor dedicated email hosting (and in our case since none of the calendaring services really integrate with project management tools, they are sort of irrelevant), and native document editing programs that can deal with version control systems (might sound silly, but LibreOffice/git with a few scripts does quite well for small team/large document collaboration). Replacement for Exchange? gmail and 365 don't really fit the bill either, at least not for my needs. But even a totally insufficient solution can feel like a good alternative to an overworked system administrator -- email is one of the funkiest, stupidest, most overregulated, over attacked insecure remnants of the old trusting trust internet.
Re: Exchange server alternative?
You know what you also can't do with Gmail create a SOX compliant export for regulators if you get audited.So if there is reason to believe that your companies emails contains data pertinent to the financial transactions of your company and your company gets audited you are in deep trouble. It is also the legal responsibility of the person or people in charge of maintaining the email system to ensure the compliant backups are taken and made available upon request.That's why most large and or financial companies in the united states won't use it.And some times the regulators are the ones who are actually asking for the tap via a compliance officer on some ones emails without managerial approval and its really bad if they can't do that.You can thank Enron for that.-- Sent from my HP Pre3On Feb 9, 2014 1:25, Nico Kadel-Garcia nka...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Paul Robert Marino prmari...@gmail.com wrote: info sec is not the problem it's a record keeping issue. Info sec for email is *always* a problem. It's also critical to the record keeping: the ability to re-route, or delete, or backfill email needs to be handled. (Do not get me *started* on desires to backfill email that never happened, or to silently tap people's email with or without managerial permission! Switching to GMail made it possible for me to say "can't be done!!!" and avoid responsibility for such abuses.) Fortunately, modern IMAP based email systems give easy ways to transfer or replicate email wholesale ti alternative servers, wholesale. Thank you, *gods* for the migration from POP based services, which have mostly disappeared but stored all the folder information on the client. For most clients, they can pretty much cut and paste their old Exchange folders to a new IMAP environment. *Migrating* from Exchange to the new environment takes time and effort. For folks recommending Zimbra or Zarafa, I'd be very curious how they migrate data from Exchange clients. I'm sure that part's not just "drop-in replacement".
Re: Exchange server alternative?
On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Paul Robert Marino prmari...@gmail.com wrote: You know what you also can't do with Gmail create a SOX compliant export for regulators if you get audited. You mean like the regulations the Google Apps Vault was designed to support? I can see the risks if you've convinced that legal tapping may be committed, to your detriment. It's a risk of any SAAS businesses, and for a company with military or high value international traffic, certainly. Consider the NSA or even foreign intelligence to already have access to all the traffic. But in many environments, *they have it anyway*, without a warrant. The Carnivore email monitoring system is still in place, or a renamed version of it, to monitor email at the backbones of the Internet. In-house email repositories are vulnerable to external abuse of backdoors in firewalls and routers to grab your internal credentials and go poking around your systems, or rootkitted laptops may have already penetrated your systems. Securing against that kind of intrusion is a *lot* of work, and it doesn't usually pay the bills or get glowing project reports on your annual reviews. Using something like Scientific Linux and RHEL for internal services is a good place to start. Handing it off to someone who can afford a very sophisticated group to do precisely that kind of protecton or, as needed, access i often a wise investment. So if there is reason to believe that your companies emails contains data pertinent to the financial transactions of your company and your company gets audited you are in deep trouble. It is also the legal responsibility of the person or people in charge of maintaining the email system to ensure the compliant backups are taken and made available upon request. That's why most large and or financial companies in the united states won't use it. They're learning. Setting up in-house mail systems is fraught with adventures: ensuring high availability, supportability, archival access, and infosec have all grown and evolved. This is where build your own with even a good environment like Scientific Linux gets adventuresome. Setting up reliable backups, firewall control to the servers, good failover, spam And some times the regulators are the ones who are actually asking for the tap via a compliance officer on some ones emails without managerial approval and its really bad if they can't do that. You can thank Enron for that. That gets tricky, and it's not just Enron. Archival of mail beyond the required period is considered, by some, to be a legal liability: whether or not they've been engaged in wrongdoing, it preserves evidence that might be used against them in court. Heck, you should have seen the *outgoing* email filter I was involved in setting up once, to filter all email against a secured database of sensitive content that should not be in email. Creating filters based on data you are not allowed to see is an artform. It also ties directly to backup. Backup is often ignored, or relegated to an afterthought for critical email systems.
Re: Exchange server alternative?
Zimba is prefect. 2014-02-08 7:42 GMT+02:00 Bill Maidment b...@maidment.com.au: Have you looked at zarafa? Cheers Bill -Original message- From:Steven Haigh net...@crc.id.au Sent: Saturday 8th February 2014 13:45 To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: Re: Exchange server alternative? On 08/02/14 13:08, ToddAndMargo wrote: So I was wondering what you all thought would be a good SL6.x substitute for Exchange server? I'd actually be interested in this too... I wrote a howto[1] on getting virtual mail hosting using mysql + postfix + dovecot - however the big thing that is missing is contacts / calendar integration. Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar problem. I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar + contacts that can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: https://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 1 - https://www.crc.id.au/virtual-mail-hosting-on-el6/
Re: Exchange server alternative?
My toolchain for building a complete Samba 4.1.4 on Scientific Linux 6 is available at https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo. It's set up to set up a local yum repository for the necessary dependencies, and uses the EPEL published tool mock to build the toolchain in a clean local environment without accidental and incompatible system integrations. The mock tool is aimed at using CentOS for building the local chroot cages for compilation, but its configurations are easily edited to point to SL or to a local SL mirror. Do you need those? On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:42 PM, Steven Haigh net...@crc.id.au wrote: On 08/02/14 13:08, ToddAndMargo wrote: So I was wondering what you all thought would be a good SL6.x substitute for Exchange server? I'd actually be interested in this too... I wrote a howto[1] on getting virtual mail hosting using mysql + postfix + dovecot - however the big thing that is missing is contacts / calendar integration. Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar problem. I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar + contacts that can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: https://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 1 - https://www.crc.id.au/virtual-mail-hosting-on-el6/
Re: Exchange server alternative?
Whoops, sorry! I thought you were looking for an AD replacement, not an Exchange replacement. To replace Exchange, run, do not walk, to Google Apps for Business. It works very well, you don't have to maintain your own expert IT infrastructure to deal with the vagaries and backups and security of email handling, and their uptime exceeds that of any internal business email setup I've ever seen or helped run. You lose Outlook based calendar functionality, but you gain document sharing and collaboration to replace emailing bulky email documents around. And it plays very, very well with Linux clients such as Scientific Linux and even cell phones, unlike the Exchange suite. The spam filtering is also *ery* good. Unless you've got some very large demands for customized internal services or security far beyond that of most small shops, don't burn your time on setting up your own messaging or collaborative suite. Between managing high reliability services, backups, denial-of-service attacks, system security, customization requests, and migrating users to new tool suites, you'll burn up any benefits from having it in house with months, if not within minutes, of first running it in house in a small environment. If you *have* to continue with Outlook based clients, especially for calendaring, look at Microsoft's Online365 services. I'm afraid I can't recommend the locally installed, Linux based, messaging suite replacements for Exchange. I tried Zimbra under RHEL/CentOS some years back, and rejected it as too bulky and far too expensive in engineering time to maintain. I hope it's gotten better since, but it suffered from the same problem as Exchange: awkward integration of conflicting components and their requirements. I don't expect the mentioned Zarafa tool suite to do it any better, but I'd be curious to see more recent experience with either. Nico Kadel-Garcia nka...@gmail.com
Re: Exchange server alternative?
have you looked at openchange http://www.openchange.org/index.html It's been a few years since I looked at it but the goal is to create a exchange server replacement. On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia nka...@gmail.com wrote: Whoops, sorry! I thought you were looking for an AD replacement, not an Exchange replacement. To replace Exchange, run, do not walk, to Google Apps for Business. It works very well, you don't have to maintain your own expert IT infrastructure to deal with the vagaries and backups and security of email handling, and their uptime exceeds that of any internal business email setup I've ever seen or helped run. You lose Outlook based calendar functionality, but you gain document sharing and collaboration to replace emailing bulky email documents around. And it plays very, very well with Linux clients such as Scientific Linux and even cell phones, unlike the Exchange suite. The spam filtering is also *ery* good. Unless you've got some very large demands for customized internal services or security far beyond that of most small shops, don't burn your time on setting up your own messaging or collaborative suite. Between managing high reliability services, backups, denial-of-service attacks, system security, customization requests, and migrating users to new tool suites, you'll burn up any benefits from having it in house with months, if not within minutes, of first running it in house in a small environment. If you *have* to continue with Outlook based clients, especially for calendaring, look at Microsoft's Online365 services. I'm afraid I can't recommend the locally installed, Linux based, messaging suite replacements for Exchange. I tried Zimbra under RHEL/CentOS some years back, and rejected it as too bulky and far too expensive in engineering time to maintain. I hope it's gotten better since, but it suffered from the same problem as Exchange: awkward integration of conflicting components and their requirements. I don't expect the mentioned Zarafa tool suite to do it any better, but I'd be curious to see more recent experience with either. Nico Kadel-Garcia nka...@gmail.com
Re: Exchange server alternative?
Am 08.02.2014 03:42, Steven Haigh wrote: Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar problem. I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar + contacts that can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android Till last September there was an easy solution: Funambol (a SyncML implementation). But support for new Thunderbird clients does not exist, and so we have te search for another solution, too.. GS signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Exchange server alternative?
On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Paul Robert Marino prmari...@gmail.com wrote: Nico I tend to agree with you there are so many inexpensive mail services out there now I haven't tried to do this kind of thing in many years. But its not an option for every one especially it you work for a large company then it can still be cheaper to do it in house or depending on the industry your company is involved in there may be regulatory reasons why SAAS is not an option for any thing considered a document of record like email. I went through this at a finance company I worked with: I saw such claims, and they all failed under review. The reliability and disaster recovery and record keeping of GMail Apps was *better* than they'd ever had, or could ever be expected to do, in house. And the security was *better* than what the company had had, in-house for their Exchange system. (I had some talks with the Exchange admins and the AD admins about their security policies. It was pretty scary what they did as a matter of course.) Messaging, like external DNS, is one of those services that anyone can set up as a basic internal service, but can be done much more robustly for a very modest fee, and leave your systems people and developers to work on things that your company actually *wants* to be doing.
Re: Exchange server alternative?
On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Paul Robert Marino prmari...@gmail.com wrote: info sec is not the problem it's a record keeping issue. Info sec for email is *always* a problem. It's also critical to the record keeping: the ability to re-route, or delete, or backfill email needs to be handled. (Do not get me *started* on desires to backfill email that never happened, or to silently tap people's email with or without managerial permission! Switching to GMail made it possible for me to say can't be done!!! and avoid responsibility for such abuses.) Fortunately, modern IMAP based email systems give easy ways to transfer or replicate email wholesale ti alternative servers, wholesale. Thank you, *gods* for the migration from POP based services, which have mostly disappeared but stored all the folder information on the client. For most clients, they can pretty much cut and paste their old Exchange folders to a new IMAP environment. *Migrating* from Exchange to the new environment takes time and effort. For folks recommending Zimbra or Zarafa, I'd be very curious how they migrate data from Exchange clients. I'm sure that part's not just drop-in replacement.
Re: Exchange server alternative?
On 08/02/14 13:08, ToddAndMargo wrote: So I was wondering what you all thought would be a good SL6.x substitute for Exchange server? I'd actually be interested in this too... I wrote a howto[1] on getting virtual mail hosting using mysql + postfix + dovecot - however the big thing that is missing is contacts / calendar integration. Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar problem. I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar + contacts that can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: https://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 1 - https://www.crc.id.au/virtual-mail-hosting-on-el6/ signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
RE: Exchange server alternative?
Have you looked at zarafa? Cheers Bill -Original message- From:Steven Haigh net...@crc.id.au Sent: Saturday 8th February 2014 13:45 To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov Subject: Re: Exchange server alternative? On 08/02/14 13:08, ToddAndMargo wrote: So I was wondering what you all thought would be a good SL6.x substitute for Exchange server? I'd actually be interested in this too... I wrote a howto[1] on getting virtual mail hosting using mysql + postfix + dovecot - however the big thing that is missing is contacts / calendar integration. Thunderbird can use caldav for calendar data, but the integration doesn't really seem to be there. As for contacts, this has the similar problem. I'd also be very interested in a method to sync calendar + contacts that can be easily tied into Thunderbird / Android -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: https://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 Fax: (03) 8338 0299 1 - https://www.crc.id.au/virtual-mail-hosting-on-el6/
