kopano outlook connector is inferior to zarafa's connector ?

crankshaft

Hello;

We have been using Zarafa with OUTLOOK for many years, one feature that is absolutely essential to us and the reason we selected zarafa in the first place is the public folder support for:

Outlook - Public Folder Emails
Outlook - Public Folder Global Contacts
Outlook - Public Folder Global Calendars

These are pretty much show-stoppers for us, as we need to be able to maintain and use global contacts, be able to access each other’s calendars, and be able to forward customer emails into a public folders ‘Customer Support’ Folder.

Now all of these have been 100% working and working well for maybe 10 years on zarafa, and I have recently decided to upgrade to the latest kopano and the latest outlook connector which appears to be severely crippled over the old zarafa outlook connector.

After trawling the forums, and doing my own live tests, it does seem that the kopano outlook connector is major step backwards from the functionality in the old zarafa connector, and is now a potential show stopper for us.

We potentially will have to stick with the very old zarafa or look for another solution with better Outlook public Folder support !

fbartels

Hi @crankshaft,

I have already replied the following to you in an earlier topic:

@fbartels said in Adding a shared folder & getting the folder ID:

@crankshaft said in Adding a shared folder & getting the folder ID:

This setup has been working fine using zarafa 7.1 since 2012

We have since back then moved away from Outlook being our primary client (which was also signaled with the name change). Nowadays our primary client is WebApp (accompanied by our DeskApp for users that want a more desktop application feel). In these applications the described workflow should not post a problem.

While KOE is not the same as the old Zarafa client it works “ok” for most users and use cases, but really does not for some other. I’d encourage you to take a look at our WebApp and DeskApp instead.

crankshaft

Thanks Felix;

But the email client has to be Microsoft Outlook which is integrated with Microsoft Office.

Webapp and DeskApp are proprietary and are not fully integrated with MS Office.

The reason we started using zarafa originally was because of the good compatibility with MS Outlook and the fact that we did not require a proprietary client to use the features important to us, i.e shared emails, calendars and contacts.

Asking users to use 2 email clients, outlook and webapp is also quite impractical.

PRO123

@crankshaft said in kopano outlook connector is inferior to zarafa's connector ?:

Thanks Felix;

But the email client has to be Microsoft Outlook which is integrated with Microsoft Office.

Webapp and DeskApp are proprietary and are not fully integrated with MS Office.

No, it’s the other way around, Webapp and DeskApp are OpenSource, MS Outlook & Co. are proprietary.

The reason we started using zarafa originally was because of the good compatibility with MS Outlook and the fact that we did not require a proprietary client to use the features important to us, i.e shared emails, calendars and contacts.

Shared emails, calendars and contacts are working very well with Webapp and/or DeskApp.

Asking users to use 2 email clients, outlook and webapp is also quite impractical.

And DeskApp is even better integrated into the operating system than WebApp, regarding file download, mail standard application etc. It becomes more difficult if you are dependent on Outlook because of special Outlook plugins (CRM, ERP, UC, …), whereby Kopano integration (in somewhat larger environments) for third party systems usually with reasonable effort is possible because of open Kopano APIs.
The second disadvantage of DeskApp is the lack of offline capability, which, however, with today’s mobile connection options, is no longer really a major issue in most cases.

These discussions & considerations have been here for over 3 years since the fork to Kopano…

Regards Robert