Replacing Microsoft Exchange Server with an open source alternative
Zimbra is the first enterprise-grade open source alternative for Microsoft Exchange Server. Read on to find out how to set up your own open source collaboration and email server and finally wave goodbye to Microsoft Exchange…
This article originally appeared in issue 94 of Linux User & Developer magazine.
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Email and collaboration servers are vital to any organisation, whether small or medium in size. ‘Collaboration services’ is an umbrella term used to refer to services which help people inside an organisation to communication. These services include email, calendars, chat etc. Traditionally organisations used to pay hefty licence fees for Microsoft Exchange Server to enable these services – not to mention the vendor lock and the ecosystem lock that come as part of Exchange. Vendor lock means only Microsoft will be able to support Exchange and it decides when the licence support goes away. Ecosystem lock means it only runs on Windows servers and the client support is partial towards Microsoft-based clients only.
Meet Zimbra, an open source collaboration server which provides support for services like email, calendars, wiki, web, instant messaging etc. Zimbra Open Source Edition is completely free and can even be compiled on your own if you like. Like many other open source packages (such as Red Hat Linux), Zimbra also maintains commercial versions of its software with extra features such as Microsoft Outlook support, iPhone sync support, clustering and high-availability support, and technical support. This tutorial covers Zimbra Open Source Edition.
Please Note
The following changes can alter your system behaviour. Therefore it is recommended that you use a test machine or better yet a virtual machine (using VMware workstation or VirtualBox) to test out these steps. Proceed with caution if you are using your main machine for this tutorial. If you are performing these steps on a virtual machine, make sure that you are using the ‘Bridged Networking’ mode. This will enable the virtual machine to participate directly on the network as if it were a physical machine.
Resources
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit (Server version is supported, desktop version will also work but not supported by Zimbra.) This tutorial uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop System.
sysstat: this is a collection of tools for system monitoring:
$ sudo apt-get install sysstat
BIND DNS server: BIND is a DNS server package. This is required to install a DNS server on our Ubuntu box:
$ sudo apt-get install bind9
Network information: You should have the following information handy about your network. The following lists the required information and the assumed values for this tutorial…
Local IP Address: 192.168.1.34 Netmask : 255.255.255.0 DNS Server (Private): 192.168.1.34 (Same as the local IP address, as we will be installing a DNS server on the same machine) Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (Internet gateway, or the Router IP address) DNS Server (Public): 8.8.8.8 (Google Public DNS Server) Hostname: ludzserver Fully qualified hostname: ludzserver.lud.com Domain name: lud.com
Zimbra Open Source Edition installer: Download the Zimbra Open Source Edition here. For this tutorial we are using file zcs-6.0.8_GA_2661.UBUNTU10_64.20100820044159.tgz which is meant for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Preparing for Installation
Configuring the network settings
It is recommended that you use the static network setting for the server. Perform the following steps to set up the static network settings on your server…
1. Remove network-manager: network-manager is known to cause to problems in a server environment.
2. Edit the network interface file to look like following:
@config file: /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo eth0 iface lo inet loopback iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.32 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1
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Actually, Zimbra is FAR from the first and certainly not the best for Enterprise users — try Open-Xchange
This article reads like an advertisement for Zimbra, which isn’t really open source; it’s more “open core.” If you want it to do anything useful you have to buy the expensive version.
True open source enthusiasts would be better suited trying out Citadel [http://www.citadel.org] which is end-to-end GPL3 code and does most of the same Exchange-replacement things (and some useful Sharepoint-replacement things as well).
Actually, this quote is wrong:
“Like many other open source packages (such as Red Hat ), Zimbra also maintains commercial versions of its software with extra features such as Microsoft Outlook support, iPhone sync support, clustering and high-availability support, and technical support. ”
As someone above said Zimbra is Open Core not true Open Source. Redhat charges for services such as support, but you can download the source code with no features held back. (This is how CentOS can exist).
In contrast, Zimbra offers a “dumbed down” version for free then a paid version with extra features.
Therefore Zimbra is not like Red Hat Linux at all. This should be changed to
“Like many other open core packages (such as Alfresco), Zimbra also maintains commercial versions of its software with extra features such as Microsoft Outlook support, iPhone sync support, clustering and high-availability support, and technical support. “
Yup, this is an add for Zimbra. A better option is Egroupware. It has it’s issues, but it is enterprise ready and has some great features – not QUITE as polished, but pretty nice for a totally free app.
Why did you reboot the system during the BIND setup? Bind doesn’t do anything that requires a reboot.
E-Groupware has a 30 day trial version…how is that open source
Horde is a truly open source mailing and collaboration system…configuration is a bit of a challenge
@joe Open-xchange is not an exchange replacement as a matter of fact it is not an email system at all, it is only a groupware where you need to integrate separate email system ….
though it is intuitive interface is worth the try