Author: Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

Zarafa Server AKA Time to replace Exchange?

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[sc:software-category ]I’ve run my own mail server for many years (wow, just did a whois on my domain, created in 1998 and I used a different one before that for a couple of years), when I first started I was using a Unix box running SendMail and UofW’s IMAP/POP server.  These served me well for several years but as MS Outlook became my central client and the Internet became more prevalent, IMAP just no longer could do what was needed.  Calendaring was a big part of my move to Exchange and I haven’t looked back since.

However during the transition, I did resist as much as possible the move to Exchange.  For such a small domain I figured there must be a better solution.  Alas there just wasn’t any getting around it and I eventually committed fully to Exchange.  And no bones about it, it has served me well.  OWA is a great web client, support for my Windows Phone is obviously there and overall it takes little effort to maintain it.

Recently though doubt has started to creep in to my mind about running Exchange.  I currently have it running on a VM with 4 processors and 6g of RAM and I keep thinking I should setup another VM for it so I can replicate the database.  That’s a lot of resources for effectively 2 mailboxes 🙂

Likewise, moving to Exchange 2013 has been a pretty significant job and I just haven’t really gotten around to finishing it.

So I decided to do some research and to start with, what I thought would be the hardest part, ActiveSync support.  Turns out that’s not as hard as I thought, Z-Push, is an open source implementation of ActiveSync.  Z-Push supports a few backends, including IMAP and Zarafa.

Turns out that Zarafa is basically an Exchange replacement and comes in three flavours, open source, free and enterprise.  The big difference comes down to what features are available and how many users are supported.  The open source version does not include MAPI compatibility where as the free version does for 3 users.

Until very recently I would have said MAPI support was a requirement to be considered and Exchange replacement, however with Outlook 2013’s support for ActiveSync I’m no longer convinced that is true.  So much so that I’m considering doing something radical and replacing Exchange completely.

I think my first step will be to try running Outlook against Exchange using ActiveSync and see what the experience is like.  If all goes well I’ll stand up a Zarafa box and see how it goes from there.

P.S. After I wrote the above but before this post went live I did some more research and it appears Microsoft REALLY doesn’t want you to use Outlook as an ActiveSync client for anything but Outlook.com.  There is a workaround, but that seems kind of a pain in the butt…

The Opera Dilemma

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[sc:software-category ]I’ve been an avid supporter of Opera since, well, you had to actually pay for it…

But the move to the new rendering engine in version 15 seems to have been the result of a lobotomy of the senior management at Opera.  They’ve gutted all the things that made Opera good and replaced them with… nothing.  Seriously, there’s just nothing there.  Massively important features are missing and they write it off as being driven by market research that suggests only a small percentage of users use that feature.

I’m sorry to tell you this Opera, but those are they users that spread the word about your product and get others to try it.  If you lose them, you don’t have a hope in hell of growing your user base.

It’s so bad I’m actively trying to move from Opera, there’s no point in continuing to use version 12 if it’s never going to move forward and the direction of 15 is so counter to everything I want in a browser that I’ll never be moving to it.  Back to Firefox I guess…

Skype for WP8

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[sc:mobile-category ]A few weeks ago Microsoft rolled out an upgrade (v2.8.0.84) to Skype for Windows Phone 8 and well, lets just say it didn’t go well.

Around the same time several other apps on my phone had updates, including Facebook, Lync, WhatsApp and Netflix).  Shortly there after, at least one a day, when unlocking the phone I would be greeted with the standard “Resuming…” screen.  Hitting the home or back button didn’t do anything and bringing up the task list just showed the current app was the start screen.  Trying to switch to another app simply brought the resuming screen back.  Leaving it for a few minutes didn’t do anything and the only option that worked was to restart the phone.

At first I thought it might be The Weather network as it seemed to happen when I had been using it and then locked the phone.  However I quickly found that not to be the case as the task list clearly showed the current task to be the start screen.

My next step was to start removing apps that were running in the background, the first one I pulled was Facebook.  After several more removals, I found Skype to be the offending app.  Removing it has since returned stability to my phone and I haven’t added it back yet.

I’ve been continually surprised how little attention Microsoft has focused on the WP version of Skype, this just confirms in my mind that the Skype executives view WP as a second class citizen.

Windows Phone 8 Updates

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[sc:mobile-category ]Recently a thread on the Windows Phone UserVoice site brought up an interesting topic, where are the updates to WP8?

The just of the reply from Joe Belfiore was “be patient!”.  That really kind of ticked me off.  We’ve been patient, we’ve been waiting since WP7 for many of the simple features found on other phones with no movement on any of them.  Sure he’s basically saying that a lot of development time is being taken up by keeping the underpinnings in line with new hardware, but come on, a little bit of time on the UI surly can’t be that taxing.

How about just throwing us a bone, a couple of simple things surly are easy enough to do.  How about some profiles for ringtones and alerts?  How about a better calendar view (maybe a weekly view?)?  How about feature parity with Outlook for creating new recurring calendar entries?  How about being able to set alert settings per app instead of just the big bucket of “All other notifications”?

These are the kind of thing that you can assign a single developer to do and they’ll get it done in a day or two.  Maybe a week at most for something like the recurring calendar stuff.

Microsoft wants us to believe that they can’t manage to do two things at once.  That they are so resource constrained that the only thing they can do is upgrade the underpinnings to support new hardware.  I’m sorry, when you’re fighting tooth and nail to get market share you don’t have the option to ignore half of the work you need to do.

Seriously MS, open the pocketbook and spend some of that almost 5 BILLION dollars you earned last quarter and hire a few more programmers to throw at the WP UI team.

Source: WPCentral