He's dead, Jim. --- Isn't he?
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Yes, like you all I have for many years run Zarafa & later Kopano4UCS installations, not only for my own business, but also for several of my own customers. I’ve also maintained a paid Kopano subscription for many years.
While I’m loathed to criticise any open-source project, what I do find slightly disappointing in all of this is the lack of clear statements of intent from the stakeholders.
Univention for it’s part has had a clear warning/disclaimer on the Software Update module of it’s UCS Web management portal, making clear that Kopano Core, Webapp & Z-Push are not “UCS 5 compatible”. That rang alarm bells for me as soon as I saw it well over 12 months ago. And maybe that’s all Univention could say given they have no responsibility for Kopano development.
What I think would be really useful to all of us would be a clear statement of intent from Bytemine/Kopano on the future of the Kopano4UCS integration. It’s been abundantly clear both here and on the Univention Help forum that long time users are crying out for that.
Yes I’ve read the statements from Bytemine saying Kopano is in the UCS5 “Testing” repository. But it’s clear that there seems to be a lack of urgency &/or leadership on moving the Kopano4UCS integration forward, which is a great shame given how capable the product has been & still is. What we are all staring down though, is finding an alternative to Kopano should that sort of certainty not be forth-coming given the impending end-of-support for UCS4.
For my part I would be happy to make significant contributions to testing of a UCS5 compatible Kopano4UCS integration were there to be clear statements of commitment towards it’s future. Let’s hope he can be resuscitated Jim.
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I moved to mailcow except the missing synchronisation for notes I’m pretty happy
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@onex-de
Hi Christian,like Scotty wasn’t dead in the end, it seems to be the same about kopano4ucs.
This post
https://forum.kopano.io/topic/3821/kopano-core-und-update-auf-ucs-5-0/25?_=1652608718621
indicates it to be on the home straight and it’s univentions turn by now.Univention itself gave a statement two days ago
(german; not available in english, yet)
https://www.univention.de/blog-de/2022/05/maintenence-ende-ucs-4/
about the end of life of UCS 4.4 (Sept.'22) and suggesting the Kopano-Updates (Kopano WebApp, Kopano Core and Z-Push for Kopano) will be available for UCS5 within “weeks or month”.Spocks resurrection needed 24 month from Wrath Of Khan to Search For Spock. Let’s hope kopano4ucs to be a bit faster. Scotty did it within the 45-minutes episode.
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Sadly it is dead…
I think the options are as far as I can tell:
*freeze your present installation and keep it like this forever. This is what I am doing.
*move to another product.It is something very very sad. Kopano (or zarafa in my case that’s where I started from originally) has been an amazing product.
Yet, I suppose once the support for direct integration with Microsoft Outlook ended, it must have been difficult to maintain paid subscriptions and without licenses coming in, I can only assume that there hasn’t been much money for further development and it is now in maintenance only mode, that is waiting for the customers to slowly disappear one by one, in the mean time maintaining a skeleton staff to support current paid installations.
For as much as I would like to think otherwise, I cannot see any other interpretations of what’s happening here.
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Sorry for me not being a Treckie … :)
In short:
No, Kopano is not dead. As I wrote on different threads and can be read on the Kopano blog there have been some tough times, but we are on a good course in my opinion.
No, it were not financial matters.
Yes, we EOLed some components as only few people used it, and maintaining and further developing them made no sense in any kind.
Yes, we
No, there is currently no UCS5 integration.
Yes, we are (and were) working hard on it, and thought to release it in February or March, but (as I wrote in other threads) there is still a dependency issue when installed on secondary nodes which can only be solved by Univention themselves; we are waiting for this to happen as well.
No, there is currently no Ubuntu 22.04 version, because adapting (at least) all components to work with PHP8 and especially with openssl3 will be plenty of work.
Yes, there will be a Debian 11 release shortly. Core and WebApp seem to work fine, more tests are needed, and z-push needs to be build and tested afterwards.Bye, Daniel
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@drauer hi that’s excellent news!
How about a future roadmap? That would be amazing!
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@drauer basically we want to see Kopano alive and moving forward.
Not in maintenance mode supporting existing customers / or just moving operating systems…
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@drauer it would be great if some communication took place. We as a service and hosting provider to our customers are paying lots on licenses and don’t get any info. We are kopano partner since Zarafa was around, but in the last two odd years no single bit of information was given.
If there will be no UCS integration in the foreseeable future, tell us. Most of us can cope with it and will find other ways to integrate kopano with any authentication service.
I personally find it harder to lose the support for SUSE enterprise Linux, as this is the core of our and our customer’s infrastructure.So in a word: TALK TO US!
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I did get a call explaining that Kopano is not dead and is still being developed in the background, but I don’t really know, active looks different to me.
The kopano.com website still mentions Meet on the first page, even though it was discontinued on March 28. The last blog entry is 6 weeks old.
Especially when the loyal partners are literally begging for more active communication, it would be appropriate to comply, wouldn’t it? -
Actively developed means in my opinion maintaining the current production installations so that the remaining fees get paid till customers move elsewhere.
Quite clearly they still have income coming in, and it would be stupid not to support it.
As customers move elsewhere, bit by bit, it will come to a point where production support is stopped altogether.
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The basic issue here, is that development of something that differentiates a mail program from another one is massively expensive, and how exactly do you differentiate from one another?
yes, Kopano is good, but is it worth the license? Who knows.
The main loss was of course the Outlook backend… and since then, it has been downhill ever since.
Hence: that’s why we are here right now.
