Recently, I've gotten to install a bunch of different e-mail platforms. This has been quite an experience, both fun and frustrating. While I'm planning on writing about each platform in detail, later, I wanted to put down some of the problems that I ran into.This is just a short list of things that I noticed when installing some of the platforms. I’ll start off with the ones that weren’t much trouble and then move into the ones that were painful:
Zimbra – This was, by far, the easiest of the non-Exchange installs. With the Ubuntu server taking only about 15 minutes to install, and then another 15 to update and add the extra packages that are required, it was a pretty painless server setup. The install of Zimbra, itself, was quick and painless as well. The only information that you really have to have set up ahead of time is the license file. The one complaint that I had about this package was that I wasn’t able to find an easy way to add multiple users, from a text file or something like that. It may exist, I just didn’t spend too much time looking, since it was only 20 users. Another thing is that I don’t know of an easy way to change the certificate to a non-self-signed one. I know the instructions are out there, but it has just been a low priority.
Blackberry – Because it is built on the Exchange 2007 platform, the e-mail portion of this was very simple. Once it was time to install the Blackberry Enterprise Server software, things got a little more complicated. There were several prerequisites that needed to be installed, but the documentation and instructions was excellent. The instructions were clear and concise and had screen captures of how to do everything. The only thing that happened that I wasn’t happy with was that to register a handheld, you either have to plug it directly in to the server or the user has to be able to get an e-mail with the activation/configuration PIN. Once this info is entered in to the Blackberry device, the sync occurs, but when I first started the setup, I couldn’t provision users because I had not enabled inbound mail. The initial sync took a long time to complete (several hours) but I don’t think that’s because of the setup.
Domino – This has been a difficult product to set up, simply because it is so different from the Exchange way of doing things. There is also very little documentation regarding what I wanted to do, and what there is, often assumes that you are already very familiar with how to do some tasks that are not well described. When installing and setting up the Domino server, the most complicated part was getting SMTP mail working. It wasn’t too difficult, once I knew that I had to create a connection document for SMTP, but it was not something that I was used to doing. Another thing that I haven’t quite gotten is the Sametime integration. I have everything setup on the client machines, but DWA is being obstinate. The main difficulty that I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to find any good books on the product, so it takes me twice as long to figure out how to do something than it does with Exchange (or even Zimbra).
Postpath – Postpath was the most difficult product, hands down. To start off with, just installing the hosting OS was a total pain. Having worked extensively with Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and Gentoo, I thought that I wouldn’t have any problems with CentOS. That turned out to not be the case and I had to spend several hours wrestling with some of those OS issues. When it came time to install the packages, themselves, I was very unimpressed. The install, configuration and ongoing maintenance is all done from the command line. While I would not normally complain about this, it turned out to be a big problem when I couldn’t use SSH from a remote computer, so I had to do everything logged in to the console. The install was complex and most things were not explained very well. The documentation was also somewhat lacking, often just describing the options, but not what they do or change. My main gripe with the install process is that the license is only good for one install, so when I had to start over, I had to e-mail Postpath tech support to have them send me a new license key. I found several instances of people complaining about Postpath and it seems like for most versions, it is best to have Postpath servers added to an already existing Exchange environment. One of the threads that I was following had users describing using Exchange 2003 management tools to manage the Postpath servers, but I’m not quite brave enough to try, now that I have it working.
Most of my gripes were fairly minor because most of them came about because the software and methodology are very different that what (as an Exchange admin) I am used to. Zimbra seems like a product that a well trained monkey could install, but Domino needs a lot of experience and a good bit of time spent searching for answers.