Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on June 15, 2006 02:20 PM
The first problem I've had with Open Exchange is the very thing that makes Open Exchange attractive: use MS Outlook with OXtender to synchronize (calendar, tasks, among other things) with Open Exchange. As of today, the latest version is 4.0.5 and I got enough problems with this release and the previous one. I installed it for a number of my users and renderred them unable to access the IMAP inbox on the Open Exchange. Everytime they click on the IMAP account in MS Outlook, errors such as Unable to access the server popup. I uninstalled, reinstalled with no successful. It even happened to a clean computer. If you happened to chose SLES, you will run into plenty of problems becasue as of right now SLES SP3, Tomcat "OUT OF MEMORY" is still not fixed yet. I have only around 30 users and 5-8 of them access the groupware portal at any time, the memory usage was more than 2.5 Gigs without any swapping. I also ran into Postgresql problem of Unable to creat new connection for non-root users. There are plenty problems with Tomcat and Java with Open Exchange 5 SP1.
It is just such a night mare to deal with all the problems and Open Exchange is sure to keep you busy and pissed off. You then might wonder why I complained and did not ask for help from customer support. As a buyer of the product, you get free access to the maintenance portal for 5 years. What you get from this portal are accesses to updates and documents, and a forum that dedicated for free-will support by users and Open Exchange. Free-will here means that Netline or Open Exchange is not obligated to answer your questions or problems. Because this forum is totally sealed from the world and you can not google for what happen in there. If you are like me and many others, I am greatly disappointed by the forums: questions did not get any answers or you just got sloppy answers. Many people in the forums voiced their frustration of bad customer support from Netline and wished that other potential customers should know about how bad it is. If you would like to get timely and actual support, you better buy support packages from them. I like many others thought that the maintenance forum is the fountain of answers for our problems and man oh man, how I and others were so wrong. I wish I knew the maintenance portal was this bad. Besides that, documents are not detailed and did not describe enough information to assist users to know why you have to do certain thing. Just like when you set up OXtender, they just said enter that and this information without any hints of why you need to do that. All and all, as the person who directly managed to install and administrate Open Exchange I am not happy with the information provided from Netline.
For the antivrus and spam filter, they are not that difficult to setup. Because Postfix is used as the SMTP server, I also set up Postgrey for spam deterring and so far I would say Postgrey worked beautifully.
My experience is very bad regarding customer support and documents. However, I am not bashing Open Exchange as a product. Open Exchange has good set of features and since it is built from open source softwares, you still can find help for each piece of the software seperately.
Anyway, Open Exchange is not for the faint of hearts and you need to have strong technical backgrounds for Tomcat, Postfix, Cyrus-Imapd, Postgresql , OpenLdap and among other things. The OXtender is not mature yet and riddled with problems. If you have to run Open Exchange, please tried to avoid SLES. I was convinced into getting SLES by the technical directors of one of Open Exchange partners and I am actually a Red Hat, FC guy but the differences are minimal but the problems could be quite serious.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 15, 2006 02:20 PMIf you happened to chose SLES, you will run into plenty of problems becasue as of right now SLES SP3, Tomcat "OUT OF MEMORY" is still not fixed yet. I have only around 30 users and 5-8 of them access the groupware portal at any time, the memory usage was more than 2.5 Gigs without any swapping. I also ran into Postgresql problem of Unable to creat new connection for non-root users.
There are plenty problems with Tomcat and Java with Open Exchange 5 SP1.
It is just such a night mare to deal with all the problems and Open Exchange is sure to keep you busy and pissed off. You then might wonder why I complained and did not ask for help from customer support. As a buyer of the product, you get free access to the maintenance portal for 5 years. What you get from this portal are accesses to updates and documents, and a forum that dedicated for free-will support by users and Open Exchange. Free-will here means that Netline or Open Exchange is not obligated to answer your questions or problems. Because this forum is totally sealed from the world and you can not google for what happen in there. If you are like me and many others, I am greatly disappointed by the forums: questions did not get any answers or you just got sloppy answers. Many people in the forums voiced their frustration of bad customer support from Netline and wished that other potential customers should know about how bad it is.
If you would like to get timely and actual support, you better buy support packages from them. I like many others thought that the maintenance forum is the fountain of answers for our problems and man oh man, how I and others were so wrong. I wish I knew the maintenance portal was this bad. Besides that, documents are not detailed and did not describe enough information to assist users to know why you have to do certain thing. Just like when you set up OXtender, they just said enter that and this information without any hints of why you need to do that. All and all, as the person who directly managed to install and administrate Open Exchange I am not happy with the information provided from Netline.
For the antivrus and spam filter, they are not that difficult to setup. Because Postfix is used as the SMTP server, I also set up Postgrey for spam deterring and so far I would say Postgrey worked beautifully.
My experience is very bad regarding customer support and documents. However, I am not bashing Open Exchange as a product. Open Exchange has good set of features and since it is built from open source softwares, you still can find help for each piece of the software seperately.
Anyway, Open Exchange is not for the faint of hearts and you need to have strong technical backgrounds for Tomcat, Postfix, Cyrus-Imapd, Postgresql , OpenLdap and among other things. The OXtender is not mature yet and riddled with problems. If you have to run Open Exchange, please tried to avoid SLES. I was convinced into getting SLES by the technical directors of one of Open Exchange partners and I am actually a Red Hat, FC guy but the differences are minimal but the problems could be quite serious.
Just my 2 cents.
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