Hi together!
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.
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.
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?
4. What options for professional support are there? Is it always on a
per need base or are there any support or licensing plans?
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?
6. And in general: Who is using SOGo/OpenChange in production
installations up to 50 users? I have no doubt about SOGo being solid and
scalable but there seem to be less installations of OpenChange. Iabsis
in France seem to do it. It would be of great help if somebody would
share their experiences so we can be confident about the stability of
the solution.
I am looking forward to working with your software. Again, it seems to
be a great product. I hope it meets our requirement to offering a stable
Outlook integration.
Kind regards
Michael
--
users@sogo.nu
https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
