Small business accounts are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. Office 365 technical support was unable to tell me when the limitation is reset… They also said it is very difficult to upgrade from a small business to enterprise Office 365 account. I would need to create a whole new account and migrate the domain and users, so that is not an option.

I’m just finishing writing a book about Office 365 for small businesses so this caught my eye.  It’s very interesting when you consider that a business using Office 365 could be, practically, any size at all.  If you have fifty people working at a company then each of them will only be able to send emails to 10 people every day.

50 employees isn’t a lot and 10 recipients is even less.  In the enterprise, where you could have several thousand employees, this could mean that many emails remain unsent as the limit will most likely be hit quite early in the day.

Ed very sensibly points out…

It’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which a small business can bump up against that number. In this case, the new CEO had sent a getting-acquainted message to 400 of the company’s customers and prospects. But it could easily happen to any small business. Imagine if your little company rolls out a new product that gets a mention on the Today Show or a high-profile web site like ZDNet. You could easily have 500 messages in your inbox when you get to work in the morning. If you try to respond to every one, even with a form response, you’ll hit that 500-recipient lockout before your first coffee break.

I cna only imagine, though there is little evidence of this, that this clause could exist to prevent Office 365 Exchange accounts being used for spam.  It could also exist though to ensure that Microsoft’s servers, from where Office 365 is hosted and run, don’t get swamped.

Ed contacted Microsoft who said…

In the world of email, one of the thresholds that must be enforced is the amount of email that is sent through the system by any one user or organization in order to combat spam, mass-mailing worms & viruses.  To ensure that all users experience the level of performance, email delivery expediency and client connectivity behavior that they expect, we must determine what usage typifies behavior of a spammer, for example, and put controls in place to prevent such inappropriate use.  We ask customers with legitimate needs for a service that exceeds these thresholds or must go beyond these limitations to contact support so that we can best meet their specific needs.

It’s crystal clear though that these limits are far too low for the average business.  It would prevent product launches as Ed says, or bring an entire office to a grinding halt before lunchtime on a busy day.  This could, and probably will leave many customers twiddling their thumbs while they wait, probably in vein, for Microsoft to rectify the block for them.

At the very least this will potentially put people off buying into a extremely good service.  Would it put you off?

Microsoft aims for a release in 2011 for Office 365. Currently a limited beta program is available in 13 countries. Actually, two different betas are available, one for small businesses and one for enterprises. The signup form is the same on the other hand.

Users who want to sign up for the Office 365 beta can visit the beta page to do that. They need to fill out first and last name, email address organization size and if they are interested in the small business or enterprise beta.

What’s the difference between the two beta versions?

• Office 365 Beta for small businesses: Designed specifically for smaller businesses and professionals who are looking for cloud-based productivity tools without the IT hassles.
• Office 365 Beta for enterprises: Best solution for organizations that are looking to move their productivity tools to the cloud, while staying in control of their IT services.

The beta begins on October 18, 2010 and ends on March 5, 2011. Interested parties will be contacted by Microsoft as soon as beta spots become available.

The beta is only available in “the fifty (50) United States (including D.C.), Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United Kingdom”, and only for residents “who are at least the age of majority or older in their country of residence at the time of participation”.

“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service,” said Kurt DelBene, president of the Office Division at Microsoft. “With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”

The suite of Office 365 services at this point include copies of the Office Professional Plus desktop software, that has integration with the new Office Web Apps.  Exchange and Sharepoint online are also part of the package.  Finally a new service called Lync Online offers messaging and even video-conferencing services, again hosted form the cloud.

Microsoft say the key benefits of the new service are…

• Anywhere-access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device*
• Work seamlessly with Microsoft Office and the other programs your users already count on everyday
• Business-class features including IT-level phone support, guaranteed 99.9% uptime, geo-redundancy, and disaster recovery
• Pay-as-you-go pricing options which give you predictability and flexibility for all or part of your organization
• Latest version of Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which has millions of business users today

The most important factor though will be the price.  It could turn out that for small businesses with only a few seats this service could be quite expensive.  There is a pricing document available here as a Word DOCX file, though it doesn’t really seem to include any firm information about the overall cost to each type and size of business.

Regardless, there can be little doubt that any hosted business and productivity service can only be a great thing for businesses of many sizes and also for the environment.  Imagine the effect this move will have on global warming where Microsoft will have a few, admittedly huge, server farms but that their capacity will only be increased to meet the overall demand for the product.  At the same time, the number of small server rooms, all pumping out more CO2 than would be proportionate for the volume of work those servers are actually asked to do can shrink.

This can only be a good thing.

In this article I will introduce you to Kontact and help you decide if it is ready to usurp your current tool.

Installation

If you are using KDE 4 you will likely have Kontact installed. To find out go click on Start > Applications > Office and see if it is listed. You might also notice that the constituent parts of Kontact are also listed. That is because you can start each component individually and not have to fire up the who shebang. But let’s assume you do want to fire up the whole kit.

Features

Here’s what Kontact includes:

• Summary page: Shows the summary for everything you have upcoming.
• Mail: Your email client.
• Contacts: Your contacts.
• Calendar: Your personal calendar (integrates with the Akonadi server)
• To-do list: Your tasks.
• Feeds: RSS feeds.
• Journal: A personal journal
• Notebook: A simple note taking tool.
• Popup Notes: A reminder tool in the form of popup notes.
• Time tracker: Keep track of your time.

That’s a lot of features compared to your standard groupware suite. But does it measure up? Just about any user (especially users reading Ghacks) can walk themselves through an application like this and figure out just how to  use it. What I want to do is take a look at the KEY components (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, To-do) and see how it stacks up to the competition. Where does it hit, and where does it miss.

Mail

The biggest miss here is a lack of Exchange support. GNOME’s Evolution already has the ability to connect with multiple versions of Exchange. With Kontact I have found various solutions to this problem (most of which involve a shell script-type solution that no new user would want to try), but nothing built in. The only way you can connect to an Exchange server’s email component in Kontact is if the Exchange server has IMAP support turned on.

On the plus side, Kontact’s email cleint (Kmail) does have very nice integrated Anti-SPAM and Anti-Virus tools, each in the form of a simple wizard. You open this by clicking Tools > Anti-Spam Wizard or Tools > Anti-Virus Wizard.

Calendar

Again, the biggest miss here is the lack of Exchange integration. But I have also found Kontact lacking a simple Google calendar plugin.The problem is, This is not to say that Kontact’s calendar application isn’t worth using. It is. If you are looking for a single-user calendar application that doesn’t need to be easily shared, the Kontact Calendar is outstanding. But the minute you need to share that calendar, or add a Google or Exchange calendar, you will soon find the weaknesses of this tool.

The Calendar tool does have some unique features that might appeal to you. In particular are the Time Spent and Timeline views of the calendar. And , when in the Calendar application, you can choose to add new calendars and the list of possible calendars to add looks impressive. You can add from a Kolab server, OpenXchange server, GroupWise Server, local files, and more. But until Kontact has a simple solution for Exchange and Google, it’s missing out.

To dos

There’s not much you can do wrong with a to-do list. It simply a listing of what you need to do. Like most other to-do lists in groupware suites you can take an email and convert it into a task. And you can convert to do items into calendar items.

Verdict

I was hoping to be able to start using Kontact when KDE 4.5 hit the streets. But truth be told, the lack of integration with critical tools leaves Kontact wanting…seriously wanting. Kontact has a long, long way to go before it is ready for anyone in a business environment. A single user? Sure…Kontact is a great tool for you to use. But the minute you need integration you’re most likely going to have to return to Evolution.

Zarafa is an open source collaborative software solution meant to be an alternative to Exchange. It works like Exchange, includes a web interface that has the same look and feel as Exchange, and even integrates with Outlook! Zarafa integrates with your existing mail server and includes IMAP4 and a POP3 gateway as well as an iCal/CalDAV gateway. In this article I am going to show you how to get this server up and running quickly and easily on top of a running Fedora 13 distribution that includes a working Apache server.
Features at a glance

Before we get into the installation, let’s take a quick look at the feature list Zarafa offers:

• Addressbook
• Calendar
• Notes
• Tasks
• Personal Folders / Public Outlook Folders
• Permissions for every User and Folder configurable
• Meeting invitation and free/busy option
• Resources planning
• POP3
• IMAP
• iCalendar
• Caldav
• synchronization via Z-push
• BlackBerry integration over BES
• Out-of-office message
• Brick-level backup
• Single sign-on

So it looks like there’s very little this server is actually missing eh? That’s right. Now, let’s get this baby installed.

Installation

As I mentioned earlier, Zarafa will need a working email system. You can integrate Zarafa into Postfix by adding the following line to the /etc/postfix/main.cf file:

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/zarafa-dagent “$USER”

You will also need to make sure users are in the Zarafa database as well as the Unix database on the system.

Now, to the installation of Zarafa itself. This is done completely via the command line, so open up a terminal window. The first thing you need to do (after you su to the root user) is to install the system with the command:

yum install zarafa zarafa-webaccess

This command should pick up any dependencies necessary to complete the installation. Depending upon the speed of your machine and network connection, this could take some time.

Once the installation is completed you need to issue a few commands:

• service zarafa-server start
• service zarafa-gateway start
• service zarafa-spooler start

The above three commands will start all of the necessary services for the Zarafa system. Now you need to create a public store which is done with the command:

zarafa-admin -s

Once the store is complete you need to create a test user with the command:

zarafa-admin -c USERNAME -e USERNAME@localhost -f “Zarafa Tester” -p PASSWORD

Where everything in ALL CAPS is user specific.

Now restart your web server with the command:

service httpd restart

It is now time to log in. Point your browser to http://localhost/webaccess and you will see the glorious-ness that is Zarafa (see Figure 1). As you can see the web interface looks a lot like that of the Exchange web access page. And the usage is very similar as well.

This of course doesn’t set up a complete, usable experience. In order to get email delivered into Zarafa you will need to employ the zarafa-dagent with your local mailer (as I mentioned earlier with the Postfix example).

Final thoughts

Zarafa looks extremely promising. It’s easy to install, offers full functionality (nearly equal to that of Exchange), and is open source. Give Zarafa a go and see if you think it can be an open source Exchange “killer”.

You will be surprised to see how simple this set up is…as I will show you in this article.

Assumptions

Obviously the main assumption here is that you have an account already configured on your Exchange server. I will also make the assumption that you have added your machine to your domain. If you have not added your machine to the domain, check out my article “Join a Ubuntu machine to a Windows domain“. Having your machine on the domain will make life a lot easier for you. Finally, I will also assume you have Evolution already installed on your machine.

What you need to install

There is only one missing piece you need to install on your Linux machine. To do this follow these steps:

1. Open up the Synaptic package manager.
2. Search for “mapi” (no quotes).
3. Mark the package evolution-mapi for installation.
4. Allow Synaptic to pick up all of the dependencies.
5. Click Apply to install.
6. Wait for the install to finish.
7. Close Synaptic.

You are now ready to configure Evolution for your Exchange 2007 server.

Configuration

Figure 1

Open up Evolution then click Edit > Preferences > Mail Accounts > Add. This will open up the new account wizard where you will need to walk through the steps of adding an Exchange MAPI account. Most of the steps are fairly straight-forward. In fact, there is only one step where you might need a bit of help. Once you get to the Receiving Email step of the wizard you will want to set up the following:

• Server Type: Exchange MAPI
• Server: It will be preferable to use the name (and not IP address) of your server. If this is on the domain, just use the name of the server.
• Username: Your username for your Exchange account.
• Domain name: The domain name you are on.

Once you have configured this it is very important that you click the Authenticate button. This will test your configuration. You will be prompted for your password and, upons success, will be brought back to this same screen (see Figure 1). Now click the Forward button and you can continue on. The rest of the set up should not be a problem.

After configuration is complete Evolution will then want to sync with your Exchange server. Upon completion of the sync you will find all of your email as well as you calendar and contacts available. You will notice both your Local inbox as well as your Exchange inbox are available!

Final thoughts

If you have been following closely, you will most likely notice how the argument against Linux in the buisness world is becoming less and less valid. Being able to connect to your Exchange server with Evolution makes that argument even less relevant.

What eGroupware DOES have

The feature list of eGroupware looks like this:

• Calendar (including support for groups, resources, and contacts)

• Contact manager (support for both SQL or LDAP)

• Integrated IMAP mail client

• Infolog (tasks and notes)

• Project Management

• Resource and inventory management

• File manager

• Web based authoring system

• Time tracker

• Bug Tracker

• Wiki

• Knowledge base

• On demand support from Stylite

What eGroupware does NOT have

• Support from Microsoft

• Costly licensing

Installing eGroupware

The installation of eGroupware is what will stop many users from deploying eGroupware.  The first requirement is to have a LAMP server up and running. Once that is up you’ll need to download the correct file. You can install eGroupware from source or from a binary file such as an rpm file. After you have installed the system you need to point your browser to http://DOMAIN_OR_IP/egroupware/setup/index.php and finish up the installation. At this point you will be given instructions regarding what is missing from your installation in order to continue.

Of course that is a rather minimal installation description, but it gives you an understanding of how the system is installed.

Who Would eGroupware Best Fit?

The eGroupware suite would best fit any business or enterprise who is looking for a cost-effective replacement for Exchange and is willing to put the time into installation. eGroupware is also perfect for any situation looking for an Exchange-like groupware that offers more features and better reliability.

Who Would eGroupware Not Fit?

The obvious answer to that is an enterprise with an IT staff having zero knowledge of Linux. However, it must be noted that eGroupware can be installed on an IIS server so this isn’t necessarily a credible factor. The real factor that could hinder adoption of eGroupware is if your enterprise is Microsoft-only. If your company has already spent the budget on Exchange servers and licenses they will be less likely to agree on adopting an all together different technology. Those licenses, however, will expire so this would be an ideal time to create a testing environment for eGroupware so that, when the time comes, you will have plenty to show the powers that be how well a free, open source solution can be.

Final Thoughts

eGroupware is one of those tools that will quickly become one of your favorites even if only because of the cost savings it offers. But don’t think the only reason to adopt eGroupware is cost. eGroupware is as powerful and as flexible as anything Microsoft can offer in the groupware category.

Private mode means that only trusted users that have been added by you can access the file server. You will have to change the settings from easy mode to expert to be able to create accounts for those users. Once that is done you access the user management by clicking on Menu -> Other Options -> User Accounts. Once you have created at least one user account you right click on files or folders that you have added to your file server and select restrict access and choose the username(s) that you have just created.

Another possibility would be to protect the folders and files directly without using user accounts. You have to assign a username and password to the file or folder and every user that tries to access it will be asked for this data.

HTTP File Server is highly configurable: You can set connection limits, speed limits and ban IPs from accessing your server.

This tool is great if you need to exchange files fast and have no time to setup something else. Alternatives would be to use an ftp client like FileZilla or a local Apache server with htaccess. Another option that I personally do not like that much is use file hosts to share files. I never liked the idea to send my sensible files to a third party. It does not really matter if it is encrypted or password protected or not, call me paranoid, hehe.