Zarafa on the Univention Corporate Server

Teamwork

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Thomas Drilling

If you want to use your UCS as the underpinnings for Zarafa, you will appreciate the good work that Univention partner LINET has done on the zarafa4ucs integration package.

Univention's Corporate Server has established itself in the open source community as an infrastructure provider for many free projects and products like Zarafa, Open-Xchange, or Kolab. Although all three collaboration solutions are certified for use with UCS, the only groupware appliances based on UCS are the Univention Groupware Server with Kolab and the Open-Xchange Advanced Server Edition.

Zarafa focuses on an uncompromising implementation of the MAPI protocol and positions itself mainly as an inexpensive alternative to MS Exchange. Zarafa's marketing also promotes this image. The latest release, Version 7 [1], includes many interesting features such as Unicode support, a new administrative interface, improved performance – especially for the database – and an optimized IMAP gateway. All of Zarafa's collaboration feature implementations rely on MAPI, a bona fide groupware protocol. Whether this Exchange alternative based on Zarafa really is cheaper – the vendor Zarafa claims up to 50 percent savings – depends on many factors.

Besides the cost of migration, maintenance, service, and administrator training for Linux – nothing much will change for users thanks to complete Outlook support and an Ajax web GUI that is very reminiscent of Outlook. Enterprises might also need to invest in a server operating system, because Zarafa itself doesn't sell its groupware solution as an appliance (in contrast to, say, Open-Xchange), although some Zarafa partners do.

The developers aim to have Zarafa integrate as flexibly as possible with the existing infrastructure. Thus, administrators can decide which Linux distribution they want as the basis for a Zarafa installation. In the best case, the complete infrastructure might come free of charge – if an administrator decides to deploy the community version of Zarafa on a free distribution.

The community version supports an unlimited number of

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