Author Topic: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!  (Read 58870 times)

b.deivid

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #45 on: August 03, 2014, 02:58:58 pm »
I have been using Zentyal for years now. Every year I was more and more impressed on Zentyal's progress and new features.
Zentyal was always the first thing I would recommend to others.
After bringing Openchange on board, I was excited and could not wait to get it testet.
But, after bringing Openchange on board, unfortunately Zentyal started to change.

And now this, dropping the Gateway functionality, Backup, free account, Radius, Web server.... this is just not acceptable, not for me.
So, my dear Julien Kerihuel, on Your presentation You mentioned  a method called: French Caffe. Accordding to that method, You can now observe, how the community reacts on this provocative road map [let us call it an error] !
For me, I just can say, back to ClearOS as a replacement for SBS.

CNServices

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #46 on: August 03, 2014, 04:29:35 pm »
So, my dear Julien Kerihuel, on Your presentation You mentioned  a method called: French Caffe. Accordding to that method, You can now observe, how the community reacts on this provocative road map [let us call it an error] !
For me, I just can say, back to ClearOS as a replacement for SBS.

I think Zentyal version 4.0 marks a clear, and presumably required change in business strategy. It seems necessary to suppose that the existing business model was not working—that the gateway product was not generating enough revenue to be sustainable.

If true, they have intentionally walked away from that portion of their installed base not wanting an Exchange Server replacement, as a business decision. The overall community response is almost certainly not a total surprise.

The real question is not what will the community say, but do. The lead developer is supporting a fork of the gateway product. If the gateway product was not commercially sustainable, it will be no great shock to see inadequate community support for a fork. Community support of various modules is not a bad idea, but of course that effort falls short of salvaging Zentyal as a gateway product.

So the situation is becoming clearer rapidly, and thankfully. If nothing else, I learned a lot working through Zentyal deployment.

oiaohm

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #47 on: August 07, 2014, 06:55:53 am »
The real question is not what will the community say, but do. The lead developer is supporting a fork of the gateway product. If the gateway product was not commercially sustainable, it will be no great shock to see inadequate community support for a fork. Community support of various modules is not a bad idea, but of course that effort falls short of salvaging Zentyal as a gateway product.

So the situation is becoming clearer rapidly, and thankfully. If nothing else, I learned a lot working through Zentyal deployment.

The real question is why is the Gateway product not commercially sustainable.   The answer is not good.

Lets take the Zentyal IDS.   http://suricata-ids.org/features/all-features/  Completely feature poor compared to competition.   As a Gateway no IPv6 support this is becoming a problem so other solutions end up used as gateway.

b.deivid

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #48 on: August 07, 2014, 11:51:34 am »
I doubt in Zentyal's future as a open source project. All those decisions about dropping modules is leading to one direction - profit.
They are leaving the goal to be an SBS replacement. Dropping functionality like fetching emails from external providers or backup makes no sense.
Why should fetching emails from external providers not be dropped:

1.) it is a feature of MS Exchange server and is very often used , leaving this out means that Zentyal is not able to become a drop in replacement for MS Exchange
2.) big external providers do care about all the emails - antispam antivirus, so they do a god job and there is less for you to do
3.) you can leave emails on providers server so the email is reachable through providers webmail and other software - very often the situation


StuartNaylor

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #49 on: August 07, 2014, 05:50:12 pm »
I don't think profit and opensource are mutually exclusive.

I believe opensource is about being open to all and accepting input from all.

But there manner in which things have gone apart from having code on git is very similar to closed models.

J. A. Calvo

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #50 on: August 12, 2014, 07:43:05 pm »
There have been a lot of new replies since my last one, so I'm going to try to clarify your doubts again.

I see that some of you have already understood the change of direction from "All in One" to Active Exchange, so, first of all, thank you for your understanding :)

There is no way back from this switch from the company point of view, if the goal is focus on a rock solid and complete Active Directory / Exchange replacement, any other effort from the company resources would go on the opposite direction. Anyway we are commited to help as much as possible community members wanting to maintaining them, but we need to see some real action (fork + pull requests in github), so far although we haven't received too much of them, we've always been very open to integrate community contributions (network bonding is an example of feature developed by the community).

As some of you have also pointed out, there is the possibility to have Zentyal as a virtual instance inside of other Gateway machine if you don't want to have two separate servers, but as we've said at all moment, we will also provide documentation on how to deploy the missing services on a Zentyal server (we've started already writing that documentation and there will be completed and published in the following months).

My guess is that, instead of an "all in one" with a lot of half-cooked functionality and bugs, users would prefer a smaller set of functionality that just work and where they can supplement the missing functionality with other more specific and complete solutions. For example RADIUS module is not working right now, some of you say that the removal of it doesn't make any sense, having broken stuff probably doesn't have any sense either, and maintaining it properly is not the main priority right now (this doesn't mean that it can't be resurrected in the future if there is high demand for it), and of course documentation on how to set up RADIUS on a Zentyal server will be provided.

Some of you also tell us: "listen to the users and customers. they ask and you should provide", well, that's exactly what we're doing, if you haven't guessed yet, we can openly tell you: there is a high demand for an stable Active Directory and Exchange replacement between of customers, we wish if we could fulfill also the expectations of all the users (including non-paying ones), but I'm afraid that's not possible, resources are limited.

Regarding the "Zentyal Gateway" fork, I want to clarify: we don't have anything against that (for example if someone wants to make a custom Zentyal installer with all the gateways modules being included and installed by default), but this is not the only option, we have no special interest in the "fork", I mean, if there are people really wanting to maintain the modules moved to contrib, we will be wanting to host the contrib package repo in our servers (and give permissions to upload the packages to the maintainers), and any user would be able to add this repo to its Zentyal server and install those additional modules, no need of a fork at all. Another clarification: when I talk about forking in github I mean of course for doing the pull request later and integrate those changes back in the Zentyal repo, that's the spirit of Open Source I think.

About if Zentyal would move contributed modules to the main section of repository, the answer is that only if they make sense as Active Directory / Exchange replacement or there is no other better specific replacement, if it doesn't meet these requirements they will continue forever as community maintained modules. Please note that Ubuntu also works this way, they have a main section officially supported by Canonical and universe/multiverse repos unsupported and maintained directly by the community.

Regarding the questions about the configuration backup without the "free account", it doesn't mean no configuration backup for community, just the opposite: free configuration backup for everybody without needing to register your server to Zentyal Remote nor provide any other data (only your email address so you can recover your backup in case of need).

For the ones requesting the list of all the contrib modules, you can find it at https://github.com/Zentyal/zentyal/tree/master/contrib But note that not all of them have been removed from main, some of them were always community modules.

Finally, about fetchmail functionality (and user corner removal), we are not getting back the old User Corner module with is generic and complex design, but as we've restored already the fetchmail functionality in the Zentyal administration UI, we plan also to provide a simpler replacement for user password changes and fetchmail configuration as soon as possible.
Zentyal Server Lead Developer

kbrault

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #51 on: August 12, 2014, 10:23:52 pm »
I for one .... think this may be a good direction. We are not Zentyal users because every time we tried it we found too many little issues that just made us uncomfortable.

As far as I know no one has entered the Active Exchange market with an open source product. This market looks untapped. But there are others in the all-in-one market.

We can find other products to fill the holes. Especially since we run everything on VM's. Our customers do pay maintenance and we usually steer them towards ClearOS with NAS and with Endian or Sophos for a firewall.

But the AD/Exchange replacement has always been the "Holy Grail" that we could not find.

CNServices

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #52 on: August 12, 2014, 11:10:34 pm »
...no need of a fork at all.

I may not understand, but to me this seems true only under ideal conditions, long term:
  • There are no conflicts between contributed modules and future versions of Zentyal itself.
  • There are no conflicts between contributed modules. Or, said another way, that all contributed modules work seamlessly together across updates.
I think this is unlikely, but even so I do appreciate your willingness to be helpful in any way possible. That says a lot.

estebanldu

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #53 on: August 12, 2014, 11:30:25 pm »
Saludos a la comunidad

Me pueden explicar porque estan quitandole funcionalidad a Zentyal con cada nueva version, creo que deberian aumentarle, ya que desde la version 3.0 que quitaron el modulo de Asterisk a mi forma de ver fue un error, y en esta nueva version que saldrá en octubre quitan el IDS, Webserver, Radius, que va a pasar luego solo quedaran el modulo de DNS y NTP.
Comprendo que Zentyal busca reemplazar a Windows Server, sin embargo el enfoque que yo conocía era de un servidor ALL IN ONE, pero con estas nuevas versiones esta dejando de serlo.

ptiglobal

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #54 on: August 13, 2014, 01:52:37 am »
I understand for many people this is an unpopular path you are undertaking. I, however, can see the value of a straight-up AD/Exchange replacement.

I am curious how you're going to handle calendaring. How will that be integrated such that an Outlook client will see the Zentyal server as a single Exchange system that handles both email and calendaring?

fasttech

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #55 on: August 13, 2014, 02:31:22 am »
I've always used Zentyal as a mail, web and file server, behind gateways, for really small business and true non-profits, places using mostly home versions of windows.

That said I'm not sure at this point how 4.0 will fit in, if it won't have a public facing web server, I'm still not clear on that, it'll be tough for me to justify investing anymore time in Zentyal but when 4 is released I'll check it out.

So, for my installations, a couple dozen, I'll continue to use v3.3 for new installs, because of the basic server functionality listed above as well as Nut, Monitor, Events, Mail Filter and Roundcube. It's easier than rolling my own and most importantly, security updates from Ubuntu will be good until 2017.

I don't think anyone should be using v3.4 since it's built on 13.10 which will be dead very soon.
I don't think anyone should be using v3.5 since it's a bastard child and though it's built on 14.04, good till 2019, v4.0 will be such a change where could that possibly leave v3.5?
Certainly no one should trust an upgrade to v4, I've had successful upgrades from 3.3 to 3.4 but that's scary and still not trustworthy.

No, I'll continue with 3.3 iso installs until I find a replacement, ClearOS went weird with v6 and I still haven't sussed that out yet.

There's also webmin on 14.04 for basic server.

Escorpiom

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #56 on: August 13, 2014, 03:15:00 am »
Some people suggest virtualization as a possible solution to the missing modules.
Been there, done that.
I found it's definitely not workable, having Ubuntu as a base OS for virtualization.
At the point of making changes (updates for example) that require reboots you also take down the gateway.

What worked for me was to physically separate the gateway stuff from the server stuff.
Firewall, proxy, Radius, Snort and Squid on one dedicated box. Gained (at last) a functional ipv6 implementation.
Web server, mail server, Samba, CUPS and Zoneminder on another box.
Hardware has become fairly efficient and small these days.
 
Obviously I'm not happy with the changes in the upcoming Zentyal. Probably it's not even going to work.
Untapped potential? Market niche?
In my opinion, if you offer exactly the same type of product (Exchange drop-in replacement) businesses will stick with MS paid solutions anyway.
If you wan't to win over those people, you'll have to offer a better or more feature rich product.
The argument Zentyal being "free" is moot, businesses gladly pay for a superior product.   
I don't see that happening anytime soon, but please prove me wrong.

Zentyal was a great way to learn, but for me it's a dead end.
Many times on the forum I've launched ideas, reported bugs and problems, waiting for some input from the dev team..
But participation from Zentyal staff is nearly none, and for me that's a real deal breaker.

As far as ClearOS concerned, I agree v6 was a bit weird, and it still seems it's not a finished product.   
That said, I'm not going to fiddle with COS again, neither with Astaro (Sophos) or the like.
For the remaining services I'll just roll my own. If anything it will be a lot more flexible.

Again, these are my personal views.

Cheers.   
« Last Edit: August 13, 2014, 03:17:07 am by Escorpiom »
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StuartNaylor

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #57 on: August 13, 2014, 10:59:42 am »
To be honest I have gone a full round circle.

I think the Zentyal team have there Dev hands tied and at the moment a lot of modules had to be dropped.

I don't think this was a matter of don't want to just can't at the moment.

Personally I have jumped ship as 389 Directory server co-exists nicely with AD shame there isn't a winsync & passync plugin for samba4.

So I am looking at Kolab as I think the web groupware product offers more and is a more standardised product.

Strangely I am probably going back to an M$ AD just for windows clients.

So its 3 servers for me Kolab, IPfire and M$ AD and they all fit quite nicely together.

I made a massive push for samba4 as I saw it as a gateway off M$ and exchange brings a client set that is the opposite to my horizon.

I do feel there is a market and if Zentyal can nail things down to how a Windows market see's software then I can't see why it wouldn't be a success.

Its all about choice and there are many platforms available now which is good and they all have their own slant on things.


J. A. Calvo

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #58 on: August 14, 2014, 08:56:43 am »
Saludos a la comunidad

Me pueden explicar porque estan quitandole funcionalidad a Zentyal con cada nueva version, creo que deberian aumentarle, ya que desde la version 3.0 que quitaron el modulo de Asterisk a mi forma de ver fue un error, y en esta nueva version que saldrá en octubre quitan el IDS, Webserver, Radius, que va a pasar luego solo quedaran el modulo de DNS y NTP.
Comprendo que Zentyal busca reemplazar a Windows Server, sin embargo el enfoque que yo conocía era de un servidor ALL IN ONE, pero con estas nuevas versiones esta dejando de serlo.

Hi, I've tried to explain everything in these two posts:

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22671.msg87700.html#msg87700
https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22671.msg88221.html#msg88221

You can use google translator if you need help with the English, if you still have any doubt after reading that, please ask in the Spanish forum:

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/board,6.0.html

Thanks!
Zentyal Server Lead Developer

StuartNaylor

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Re: Zentyal 4.0 Roadmap Published!
« Reply #59 on: August 14, 2014, 09:43:39 pm »
Jose I had a go with Zarafa and my logic was to get it up and running on 3.5 and then get the Zentyal module going.

With a lot of major changes also about to take part with the move to 3.5 > 4.0 I just feel its pointless creating a module yet.

I did have a go at just repackaging the zarafa module with zbuildtools but it failed and like I say it doesn't feel like it would be worth while yet.

When 4.0 is released I will have to see how things go but so far the reverse proxy and removal of apache seem large obstacles but until 4.0 I dunno.

Zarafa 3.5 install

There is an install for zarafa and it seems to work quite well but apart from tose

Nobody from the community gave any input what so ever not even moderators, bug checkers or any of the more mature Zentyal community members.

I was hoping that if I had a go with Zarafa maybe others might pick other modules.

Lol, that was wishful thinking :)

Maybe when 4.0 is released I will put the effort in with the module.

I have major doubts if this will be worthwhile on the whole, the community seems to be poor with the majority just being leachers.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2014, 11:39:40 pm by StuartNaylor »