Kopano for home / private use - options?
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For private / home / family use (with a possible upgrade path to SMB use if all works out well) I’m looking for ways to get out of the big-tech privacy nightmare which is Google / Gmail.
Looking for self-hosted solutions primarily (ProxMox based). Nextcloud is already up-and-running but their email offering is limited and I find their contacts / calendaring solution lacking.
Having worked with Zarafa in the past, I wanted to have Kopano on my shortlist, being MAPI based yet still open source and all.
Kopano One looks very promising.
However, it starts to get a bit confusing when it comes to thelicencingsubscription requirements.
Apparently, I can’t use Kopano One without it. Does this mean I’m out of options when I have zero budget?
Or can I use Core instead? -
@matthijs
Without buying a license, you are restricted to the nightly builds and/or whatever packages are in the package manager for your distribution. I know both Ubuntu and Univention have some Kopano packages in their repos, but i’m not sure how old they are. -
The Univention Corporate Server implementation Kopano4UCS is a great option for running a Kopano instance in a proxmox VM. I think their packages do lag the very latest Kopano releases, but not massively.
UCS can provide the Directory service (LDAP) if you don’t already have one. I’ve run Kopano this way for several years. I choose to have a paid subscription but you can still run Kopano this way without it.
I’d be happy to help/advise if you want to go down this path.
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@burgessja
The Ubuntu Packages are completely unmaintained, the kopano-server (8.7.0-7ubuntu1) for example has not been touched since the 20.04 release and if you actually look inside the package file itself everything is dated 2019-01. Not a single of the 17 updates published for kopano since 8.7.0 have been migrated to ubuntu. It’s dead.UCS might be the way to go? Can someone who uses UCS comment on how recent the packages are? It does not look good to me:
According to the website here they use WebApp 3.5.14.2539 which according to my own version archive is from early December 2019. And Z-Push seems to be at version 2.4.5, something which I would also declare as unmaintained (this version is from Nov 7, 2018).There could be something in arch linux which seems like it’s at least semi-maintained, but I’m not quite sure if I’m reading this correctly.
By the way: Not even the official final supported versions for paying customers have seen anything but point releases in more than two years, development seems to have slowed a bit?
Personally I’m using the daily builds and they usually work. But every upgrade is a bit of a risk because there is no testing on those (and they are not pulled if buggy) and if you are really unlucky you could destroy some data… Which is one of the many reasons I’ve migrated most users to Office 365 and am using Kopano less and less (which is sad, but good for my mental health). Kopano is not “really” an open source project (as can be seen from the evidence that distro really wants and maintains it in their repositories).
If you want the “final” version you probably could request a trial version, I don’t think this will expire, you just don’t get the repository for updates. But even downloading the commercial version as trial seems to be unmaintained: For Kopano Groupware there is a non functioning download link for Ubuntu 18.04, no download for Ubuntu 20.04 (even though I’m pretty sure this is supported these days) and for Kopano ONE they don’t support Ubuntu at all.
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I have been successfully using the release on openSUSE Leap 15.2 for quite some time now. It is very close to the latest version (10.0.5) and has been VERY stable. Leap is being maintained on a “release” basis, as opposed to Tumbleweed which updates daily. If you’re really looking for something for your SMB, I highly recommend Kopano on the Leap platform. Very easy to manage, too, IMHO.