Author Topic: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?  (Read 8066 times)

DeanCogger33

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Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« on: December 05, 2016, 05:06:52 am »
Hi guys,

Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support? I've read it not longer supports OpenChange? How does this impact us?

Warm regards,
Dean

Exilewolf

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2017, 07:11:22 pm »
Can we please have an answer to this question, I have also seen this pop up a bit.. I would also like to know what is going on here.

Syntax

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #2 on: February 03, 2017, 05:19:31 am »
/slowclap

Bravo dev people.  2 months and still no answer to, "hey does outlook still work with your product?"

Way to be there for the community.

Firing up some VM's now with different versions of Outlook.  Will get back to you tomorrow and let you know.  I suspect it doesn't connect to anything after ~2010 without the sourceforge caldav/carddav plugins.

FYI devs who obviously don't bother reading their own community forums, your tagline up until version 5 included trumpeting your Exchange server replacement capabilities.  I know I'm not the only one who switched to your product based solely on that fact.

salvois

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #3 on: February 04, 2017, 06:38:10 pm »
The answer to the question is, unfortunately, very clear: native Outlook compatibility using the MAPI (a.k.a. Exchange) protocol via OpenChange has been dropped indefinitely, as stated in the release notes of Zentyal 5.

The fact that no one from the Zentyal project has commented on the reasons for this, and that www.openchange.org is now unreachable, is quite annoying for me, and lets me think something happened behind the curtains. We all know OpenChange was not production quality, but this looks too sudden to me. Moreover, the "native Outlook" category in the SOGo bug tracker has been marked "(obsolete)", even if I can't find references anywhere else.

And yes, Zentyal marketed itself as THE Exchange replacement, pointing out that what differentiated them from other similar (e.g. Nethserver) projects was the native Outlook support.

All in all, I do not think Zentyal makes much sense now. Rolling your own solution based on vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 is almost trivial, especially with some help from Zentyal configuration files. I've done that and I'm quite satisfied. And I also installed OpenChange from the SOGo repositories, although I've then disabled it because of some glitches (but they were there in Zentyal 4 too...).
Using Outlook via SMTP and IMAP, the open source Outlook CalDav Synchronizer plugin is good enough to fill the hole for contacts and calendars (shameless plug: I'm the author of the backport to .net 4 for Windows XP compatibility).
« Last Edit: February 04, 2017, 06:41:18 pm by salvois »

nontrivial

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2017, 05:44:46 pm »
salvois, I agree with you to a great extent, but I still think Zentyal is worth it for SOGO and it's GUI router/admin features. But yeah, it was never much of an exchange replacement and I'm actually kind of glad they seem to have given up on it. Hopefully that means they will spend their limited resources on what makes Zentyal unique and actually worth using. I think that is why the proxy module is available again.

I still think that businesses that want exchange will always prefer to spend ridiculous amount of money to have the real thing, and there are plenty of free alternatives for those few businesses that think otherwise.

Imagineer66

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #5 on: March 29, 2017, 11:20:13 pm »

All in all, I do not think Zentyal makes much sense now. Rolling your own solution based on vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 is almost trivial, especially with some help from Zentyal configuration files. I've done that and I'm quite satisfied. And I also installed OpenChange from the SOGo repositories, although I've then disabled it because of some glitches (but they were there in Zentyal 4 too...).
Using Outlook via SMTP and IMAP, the open source Outlook CalDav Synchronizer plugin is good enough to fill the hole for contacts and calendars (shameless plug: I'm the author of the backport to .net 4 for Windows XP compatibility).

I'm think of doing something similar.  What does Zentyal do that SOGo does not?  Is it just the network/firewall configuration now?  Zentyal does a pretty good GUI.  Are there GUI administrations for Samba AD?

Arvi89

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #6 on: April 07, 2017, 05:11:02 am »
Yeah, I'm actually surprised there is a version 5, I honestly thought the project was dead, they never talk in the forum, the documentation is really dated, the website has obvious bugs, I would never tell my boss to pay a licence that's too scary.

Sal

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #7 on: May 14, 2017, 05:40:21 pm »
Lack of Dev responses to simple questions, and the lack of updated documentation is why I would never pay for a Zentyal License.  Nor would I ever ask any of my clients to do the same.  Before I pay for any license, support and development must be active. 

I do run Zentyal personally.  Mainly because I'm hopeful they will eventually get things right, and become the drop in replacement they claimed they were.

Laurent Dinclaux

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #8 on: August 13, 2017, 10:06:52 pm »
It does the job for me as it. But they are so bad in supporting the community that I am not confident about their paid support. As so, I advised many of my customers to NOT pay for it.

Also I wonder if they keep some bugs on purpose in the development edition, to ruin it. A simple exemple is the mail filter that doesn't work unless you make that ridiculous fix.
Laurent

shyres

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Re: Does Zentyal 5 still include native Outlook support?
« Reply #9 on: August 22, 2017, 11:28:10 am »
It does, Activesync support is added now which was easy to enable with a tick box in the Mail module and I've tested it working perfectly with Outklook 2016 and Zentyal 5