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For people interested in this sort of thing; There is also Open-Xchange: https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite https://www.open-xchange.com/product

For people interested in this sort of thing; There is also Open-Xchange: https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite . It has a really long history. It started out as a SUSE product. It's a bit larger then most groupware. It's more of an entire Google Workspace replacement. Installing and running it can also be a bit more of daunting task. We ran it for 10+ years on premise before we migrated to Google Workspace.

hobo_mark 3y ago
> It's more of an entire Google Workspace replacement. You mean a GMail replacement? It does not look like it does anything other than email, which is only one piece of Workspace.
- kitd 3y ago
  The website's not great IMO (the nav bar doesn't seem to work at all on my machine) but about half way down https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite-cloud https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite-cloud is a grid showing the capabilities, incl calendar, doc editing & storage and tasks, on top of email.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  OX provides alternatives for Gmail+contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs/Sheets/etc. I remember it having chat and calling capabilities too, but on github their messenger is marked as archived and the mobile app seems to have been taken down, so I'm not so sure about that.
rsolva 3y ago
What was the reason behind the move to Google?
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  I assume you mean from on-prem OX to Google Workspace? Maintaining OX is not super much work but it is a complex piece of software. You'll have a lot of moving parts; Open-Xchange (OSGi / Jetty application), MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, etc. All these parts need monitoring, disaster recovery, high availabilty setup in some cases, etc. The "absolute amount of time" these things cost isn't even super much. Especially if you are already pretty proficient in the technologies. But, personally, the hardest part of maintaining a bunch of these opensource solutions on-prem is that you are people's "go to person" for it. Meaning everything what happens to it is "your problem". For example if people perceive the solution as slow, you will need to deep dive in it. If Google Workspace is slow it's a Google problem. Maintaining these solutions (at the time we also used Zulip on-prem, Asterisk and some other stuff) becomes a recurring distraction. Patching, investigating stuff like a failed backup, breaking updates, testing updates, user complaints, etc. So for us (about 60 people at the time) it simply wasn't worth the effort anymore anno 2018 to self-host it if you could offload it for 15 Euro a month to Google. But when we started out in 2005, it was. Also keep in mind that in my role as software developer the on-prem stuff was a "secondary objective".
  - rsolva 3y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. I think a common mistake is to not make the maintenance a part of someone's job description and actually pay them for this type of work. If keeping things running feels like a secondary objective, a distraction, it's quite hard to stay on top of things and be proactive, not reactive.
traceroute66 3y ago
> There is also Open-Xchange I think most people can safely rule-out Open-Xchange unless they've got deep pockets. Sadly commercialism has taken over there, and their sticky hands have now reached Dovecot. The open-source version of Dovecot 3 will have the vast majority of multi-server functionality stripped from it. OX have stated on record[1] that their plan is that open-source Dovecot 3 will supported and maintained for single-server use only. If you want multi-server you will need to pay $$$$$$$$$ for the commercial version. [1] https://youtu.be/s-JYrjCKshA?feature=shared&t=912 https://youtu.be/s-JYrjCKshA?feature=shared&t=912
- da768 3y ago
  Last thing I know about trying to purchase commercial Dovecot, you had to harass the sales team to get an answer, and a few thousand users with 10TB+ data was "too small" for them.

hobo_mark 3y ago

> It's more of an entire Google Workspace replacement. You mean a GMail replacement? It does not look like it does anything other than email, which is only one piece of Workspace.

kitd 3y ago
The website's not great IMO (the nav bar doesn't seem to work at all on my machine) but about half way down https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite-cloud https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite-cloud is a grid showing the capabilities, incl calendar, doc editing & storage and tasks, on top of email.
jeroenhd 3y ago
OX provides alternatives for Gmail+contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs/Sheets/etc. I remember it having chat and calling capabilities too, but on github their messenger is marked as archived and the mobile app seems to have been taken down, so I'm not so sure about that.

rsolva 3y ago

What was the reason behind the move to Google?

jsiepkes 3y ago
I assume you mean from on-prem OX to Google Workspace? Maintaining OX is not super much work but it is a complex piece of software. You'll have a lot of moving parts; Open-Xchange (OSGi / Jetty application), MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, etc. All these parts need monitoring, disaster recovery, high availabilty setup in some cases, etc. The "absolute amount of time" these things cost isn't even super much. Especially if you are already pretty proficient in the technologies. But, personally, the hardest part of maintaining a bunch of these opensource solutions on-prem is that you are people's "go to person" for it. Meaning everything what happens to it is "your problem". For example if people perceive the solution as slow, you will need to deep dive in it. If Google Workspace is slow it's a Google problem. Maintaining these solutions (at the time we also used Zulip on-prem, Asterisk and some other stuff) becomes a recurring distraction. Patching, investigating stuff like a failed backup, breaking updates, testing updates, user complaints, etc. So for us (about 60 people at the time) it simply wasn't worth the effort anymore anno 2018 to self-host it if you could offload it for 15 Euro a month to Google. But when we started out in 2005, it was. Also keep in mind that in my role as software developer the on-prem stuff was a "secondary objective".
- rsolva 3y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. I think a common mistake is to not make the maintenance a part of someone's job description and actually pay them for this type of work. If keeping things running feels like a secondary objective, a distraction, it's quite hard to stay on top of things and be proactive, not reactive.

traceroute66 3y ago

> There is also Open-Xchange I think most people can safely rule-out Open-Xchange unless they've got deep pockets. Sadly commercialism has taken over there, and their sticky hands have now reached Dovecot. The open-source version of Dovecot 3 will have the vast majority of multi-server functionality stripped from it. OX have stated on record[1] that their plan is that open-source Dovecot 3 will supported and maintained for single-server use only. If you want multi-server you will need to pay $$$$$$$$$ for the commercial version. [1] https://youtu.be/s-JYrjCKshA?feature=shared&t=912 https://youtu.be/s-JYrjCKshA?feature=shared&t=912

da768 3y ago
Last thing I know about trying to purchase commercial Dovecot, you had to harass the sales team to get an answer, and a few thousand users with 10TB+ data was "too small" for them.