Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions
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@scottalanmiller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@MattSpeller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I'd love to know how this has boiled down, can someone TL;DR this 200 post saga for me?
Yes, and I'll do another thread of our findings. But it comes down to: Zimbra surprised us as the clear winner. Kopano just wasn't up to the job. But has nice features that we'd like to have, but don't need.
Thank you, looking forward to that.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I entirely disagree. Plenty of vendors still produced software for Windows XP although it was dead years ago.
Of course they do. And not one would I consider production ready. That, by definition, to me is hobby class software - a total joke and I can't take seriously any business that would go through route. What does that say about the business' opinion of itself?
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@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@MattSpeller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I'd love to know how this has boiled down, can someone TL;DR this 200 post saga for me?
Scott bailed on Kopano, found the forum to be wanting. and the product to not work on Vendor supported Enterprise OSes.
I wasn't the only one working on it, @romo was the first to voice concerns that it wasn't up to snuff.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I entirely disagree. Plenty of vendors still produced software for Windows XP although it was dead years ago.
The software you produce is for your customers, not for the beauty of it.
In Brasil cars run on ethanol, so you have to make engines for that.
Same.
If you bought and deployed software today that only worked on XP, then I expect your company to fail in the near future. This would just be crazy.
This is basically what Scott is saying - I'm not saying I fully agree, but I see where he's coming from.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
If you are a bank you want the minimum change possible to keep going. That's how they function. I work in that environment and trust me Ubuntu 16.10 will be here in 2028
And we wonder why there are so many problems with banks? wonder why they are so out dated, often don't have modern choices.
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@scottalanmiller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@MattSpeller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I'd love to know how this has boiled down, can someone TL;DR this 200 post saga for me?
Scott bailed on Kopano, found the forum to be wanting. and the product to not work on Vendor supported Enterprise OSes.
I wasn't the only one working on it, @romo was the first to voice concerns that it wasn't up to snuff.
lol even that was to far back for me to know about
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Leaving banks aside software companies like car companies make products that people want to buy.
Diesel cars are polluting? Yes they are but people buy them so they make them.
Ubuntu lts isn't supported? Yes but people or companies run it therefore software companies make software for it!
Electric cars? Cars on hydrogen?
All good ideas and no. Customers!
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
All I said is that with a little bit of patience you would have had your answer and your system.
That's the kind of thing that worries me about it in production. Because nothing is tested and there are only nightly builds, you never know when you will get a viable product. You can get lucky, or you can be screwed. Every day is a new, undocumented adventure. Will the packages be there THIS time? Who knows. Three days without them that we know of. Probably longer, that's only as long as we've been watching. Ask for help and just get told that it works and has worked... obviously not even making a cursory check to see if that were true.
If this was in production for a customer and I told them "well the system is down and we aren't sure when a viable product will even be made again, we will check back every day to see" we'd be fired instantly for having deployed such a thing. Zimbra, we know that there is a heavily tested, stable release available every day. Is that perfect, no bugs still get found, but there is a process for production release. There is an honest attempt at a stable, supportable, documentable version that we can reproduce in different places. It's tested and they stake their reputation on it.
I understand that this isn't the same as paid support, but paid support with Kopano would have the same problems. How do we trust their commercial software if we can't see it? We don't know what their release process is. All we know is that the code it is based on can't be being tested, it isn't even complete.
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@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I entirely disagree. Plenty of vendors still produced software for Windows XP although it was dead years ago.
The software you produce is for your customers, not for the beauty of it.
In Brasil cars run on ethanol, so you have to make engines for that.
Same.
If you bought and deployed software today that only worked on XP, then I expect your company to fail in the near future. This would just be crazy.
This is basically what Scott is saying - I'm not saying I fully agree, but I see where he's coming from.
Yeah, not because of the software itself, because of the processes that got you to that point.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Ubuntu lts isn't supported? Yes but people or companies run it therefore software companies make software for it!
I already pointed out why that was a good idea. So you agree that the target audience is "for the masses doing hobby class stuff" and not the smaller audience of serious busisenss. That's the assessment we made yesterday. Now we are on the same page. There is nothing, I mean it nothing, wrong with making hobby class software. You just can't bring it to an IT community and expect us not to react to it not being production ready for real business. That's why the responses are this way.
Fog Creek pulled the same stuff on my years ago. I returned it and got a refund. I'm just treating Kopano as I would any product that I need to evaluate.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Ubuntu lts isn't supported? Yes but people or companies run it therefore software companies make software for it!
This is fine - go a head and make software for LTS, but don't not make software for the current, fully supported top of the line at the same time.
Because as Scott said, anyone looking at starting to use this product today should want to start with the latest and greatest version of software available.For example, If I wanted to deploy Exchange today, I wouldn't buy Exchange 2016 and then deploy it on Windows Server 2012R2 - that would be crazy. I should be deploying it on Windows Server 2016.
With 2016 if I find a problem, and pay MS for support, they will work to fix that problem, even if that includes writing a fix for it.
If I'm on 2012 R2, MS will likely tell me - oh sorry to bad.. yep you found a problem, please upgrade to 2016 where we will fix that problem.
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@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Because as Scott said, anyone looking at starting to use this product today should want to start with the latest and greatest fully supported version of software available.
The bit that I added in bold is key. Latest and greatest is not at all what we are looking for. Sure, if all other things are equal and we have to choose between new and old, new is better. But it's all about the best support options. That old means "partial support" and latest and greatest means "actual support" is what makes latest and greatest the big deal here. They just coincidentally overlap.
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@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
If I'm on 2012 R2, MS will likely tell me - oh sorry to bad.. yep you found a problem, please upgrade to 2016 where we will fix that problem.
Oh no, 2012 R2 is a true long term support like CentOS 5 and 6 and 7. If you find an issue, MS will fix it, if it is a real issue. They will absolutely fix it. That's what makes it true LTS, not just a name. No one with real long term support puts it in their name, it's just their support level.
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@MattSpeller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I'd love to know how this has boiled down, can someone TL;DR this 200 post saga for me?
I can tell you how things originated.
We tried to install Kopano, our first choice was Centos 7 which we couldn't get working becuase of dependency trouble. Then we tried on Ubuntu 16.10, we knew it didn't appear on the list of supported OS, which was this:
Ubuntu 16.04 didn't appear there either, but @mcostan had the install working on it, so I thought it was worth the shot trying to get it on working on the latest supported version of Ubuntu.
So I tried the install, on Ubuntu 16.10 but once again was met with dependency trouble.
So I reported to @scottalanmiller the complications I was having and that I was going to try Ubuntu 16.04 to see if it would even work. Finally, I did get it working on 16.04.
but I still told @scottalanmiller that the documentation didn't appear current, it was not really easy to follow, and the whole installation process felt awkward.Then another error in the documentation appeared, which led me to not being able to add a user to the system.
Why was I getting the error, because I followed a note in the documentation.
I reverted the change, and finally got the user added and got access to the webapp.
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@Romo +10 internet points to you, thank you
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@Romo said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
@MattSpeller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
I'd love to know how this has boiled down, can someone TL;DR this 200 post saga for me?
I can tell you how things originated.
We tried to install Kopano, our first choice was Centos 7 which we couldn't get working becuase of dependency trouble. Then we tried on Ubuntu 16.10, we knew it didn't appear on the list of supported OS, which was this:
Ubuntu 16.04 didn't appear there either, but @mcostan had the install working on it, so I thought it was worth the shot trying to get it on working on the latest supported version of Ubuntu.
So I tried the install, on Ubuntu 16.10 but once again was met with dependency trouble.
So I reported to @scottalanmiller the complications I was having and that I was going to try Ubuntu 16.04 to see if it would even work. Finally, I did get it working on 16.04.
but I still told @scottalanmiller that the documentation didn't appear current, it was not really easy to follow, and the whole installation process felt awkward.Then another error in the documentation appeared, which led me to not being able to add a user to the system.
Why was I getting the error, because I followed a note in the documentation.
I reverted the change, and finally got the user added and got access to the webapp.
Enterprise ready for sure!
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Where is the bit of my posting that says that:
Zimbra gives you the community software which is the same as the paid one except it contains little features for free?
Kopano gives you the entire stack out of the main branch and if you want the production releases you call them up?
The net result for an unpaid user is a tradeoff of features vs releases.
For a paid user the net result is the same other than perhaps you choose the one that looks best for you?
At the end of the day that's the summary.
You do not need all the advanced features by the look of it therefore you can stay with Zimbra.
I can't as I need the full product.
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@mcostan said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:
Where is the bit of my posting that says that:
Hold on - where did @stacksofplates quote you saying this? I don't see that in his post.. He only said
Enterprise ready for sure!
Is he taking a jab at the product, for sure! at you? I don't think so.
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As a follow up, we've been on Zimbra now for quite some time and we are extremely happy with it still. It's been rock solid, been through several upgrades, and "just works". Easy to manage, easy to work on, and great for the end users. Far better than the Hosted Exchange or Gmail that I also have to use for different places. I use all three and for me, Zimbra is the least flashy but most functional. And on the admin side, it is the simplest.
We have been on Zimbra 8.7 for a while. Rumour is that there will be a heavily revamped interface in 8.8. That will be a really big deal.
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Lol now Scott seems to be advocating for self hosted email.
