So Tatyana, the owner of a small cleaning company, acquired the Microsoft office suite. While there were few orders, all customers could be entered into one simple table in Excel - there were also data on orders and payments. Looking at this table, it was easy to plan the loading of employees .. The business was growing, more employees were in the office, and the purchased licenses were not enough. And to buy new ones - it turned out to be more expensive than Tatyana expected. Tatyana rejected the advice of a familiar computer technician to download the hacked version, but the problem had to be solved: not to return to the grandfather's way of accounting in a notebook. Figuring out how competitors solve this issue, Tatyana, that it seemed that the messenger, mail, a list of all contacts, both external and internal, a common calendar where tasks of all employees would be displayed for the day or for the week would not interfere with the work of remote employees , cloud storage for shared files.
All communication of the employee-client with the office is via a smartphone: it contains information about received and executed orders, plans, contacts, a working messenger. Yes, and the qualifications of employees are not such as to oblige them to install and use different applications on the phone - it is inconvenient, and there may not be enough memory.
Therefore, Tatyana's key requirements are:
- The most complete functionality
- Lack of capital expenditures
- Low monthly payment
- Ease of use
- Security
- All functionality from a single interface
- The ability to easily scale the system
- Mobile version available
The business owner, along with her friend working in the IT field and versed in various software, decided to test 3 popular solutions:
- Office 365
- My office
- Zimbra / zextras
Many companies in Russia use office software from the American Microsoft Corporation, which entered this market back in the 90s of the 20th century. However, the situation is changing and now on the market there are many similar solutions from other developers. One of these solutions is Zextras Suite, which allows you to deploy a platform for corporate communications both in your enterprise and in the cloud, as a service. Zextras is known as the developer of extensions for the Zimbra open source mail server. Its main product, Zextras Suite, adds text and video chat to Zimbra OSE, data backup, document collaboration, support for mobile devices and disk storage with a high degree of reliability and economical use of computing resources. The solution is used in the world's largest companies, telecom operators and cloud service providers by more than 20 million users. Let's deploy and test this solution and compare it with Microsoft Office 365 and the domestic MyOffice solution.
Server Deployment
In order to start deploying Zextras Suite, you need to prepare a server for Zimbra. Minimum requirements for installing Zimbra Collaboration Suite: a 64-bit processor from Intel or AMD with a clock frequency of 1.5 GHz, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and more than 5 gigabytes of memory on your hard drive. The server must have Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, RHEL, or CentOS operating system installed. Choose Ubuntu. Note also that before installing Zimbr, the server must be assigned a fully qualified domain name (FQDN).
Download the free Zimbra Open-Source Edition distribution of the latest version from here: https://svzcloud.ru/zextras/ . You can download a test version of Zextras Suite from here: https://www.zextras.com/en/download/ .
First of all, we will install the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. To do this, unpack the downloaded archive using the tar zxpvf command , and then run the installation script ./install.sh. Since for testing we carry out a single-server Zimbra installation, for its correct operation the following Zimbra Collaboration Suite components will be required: zimbra-core, zimbra-ldap, zimbra-logger, zimbra-mta, zimbra-dnscache, zimbra-snmp, zimbra-store, zimbra -apache, zimbra-spell, zimbra-memcached, zimbra-proxy, zimbar-drive, zimbra-imapd . In addition, we will need to agree to use the standard Zimbra repositories to install patches.
After the installation of Zimbra is completed, the installation menu will prompt you to carry out the initial installation, where you can set the administrator password. To do this, you will need to press the numbers 7 and 4 in order to go to the corresponding menu item, and then press the letters R and A in order to return to the initial menu and apply the changes. On this, the Zimbra installation is completed and we can only open the TCP ports 25,80,110,143,443,465,587,993,995,5222,5223,9071 and 7071 on the server for normal operation of Zimbra. After that, at the address mail.server.ru : 7071 / the Zimbra administration panel will start to open, where the mail server and collaboration tools will be managed.
After the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is installed, you can proceed with the installation of the Zextras Suite extensions. Unzip the downloaded archive. Inside the archive is the install.sh installation script. In order to install all the add-ons, you must run it with the -all option. The final command will look like this: ./install.sh -all . After the installation is successfully completed, the Zextras Suite section will appear in the Zimbra admin console, in which you can use the functionality of Zextras add-ons.
Adding Users
So, after installation, a server with Zimbra Open Source Edition on board appeared in our enterprise. It's time to give access to it to those who will directly use all the advantages of Zimbra in their work, that is, create accounts for employees of enterprises. Zimbra Collaboration Suite OSE can integrate with Active Directory. You can read the instructions on how to achieve this integration on the Zextras blog on Habr.ru. However, for the sake of testing Zimbra and Zextras Suite, we will try to create new users.
This can be done both in the Zimbra admin panel and in the console. In the administration panel, select “Management” in the side panel and then go to the “Users” sub-item. In the window that opens, you need to find the drop-down menu in the upper right corner, and select “Create”. In the window that opens, you must specify the name of the account, as well as the name, surname and, if desired, middle name. In addition, you can enter and confirm a password. after clicking the “Save” button, the user will appear in the system.
In the console, to create a user, you can enter the command zmprov ca marketing@company.ru qwerty . After its execution, a user with the marketing@company.ru mailbox and qwerty password will appear in the system. Also, if the company has a server with AD, you can add accounts to Zimbra directly from it.
Ensuring Zimbra Reliability
Since the collaboration system is always one of the key in the enterprise, it is very important to ensure the safety of data and minimize downtime. To do this, configure the backup using the Zextras Backup extension. You need to enable the extension in the admin console. In the left pane, find the Zextras Suite item, expand it, and then switch to ZxBackup. Then, in the “Basic Backup Configuration” section of the Zextras Backup settings, you need to click the “Initialize NOW” button, and then turn on SmartScan, which will incrementally save every change that occurs in Zimbra mail storage.
All the backup information is accumulated in the / opt / zimbra / backup folder, however, it is unreasonable to store the backup copy on the same server with a running system, therefore we recommend that you mount either an external drive or a network drive in the / opt / zimbra / backup folder so that the backup media is geographically remote from the main server. A combination of these backup methods is also possible. Suppose you have connected a network drive to / opt / zimbra / backup, but you want to have an external drive with a full copy of Zimbra data. In order to accomplish this, the External Backup option is useful to you. Thanks to it, you can make a full copy of the data on an external drive connected to the server.
However, as the amount of data generated by Zimbra users grows, so does the amount of data they use, and as a result, the time taken to create a full backup increases. In order to reduce it, you can use the Zextras PowerStore extension, which allows you to use compression and deduplication, which can reduce the space occupied by the mail storage space by up to 50%, and also connect additional storage to the server without using LVM.
Other Zextras extensions can also be very useful. For example, Mobile will allow you to use all the features of Zimbra and Zextras Suite on mobile devices. Admin allows you to use the solution in large enterprises with many divisions, appointing them as their administrators and partially delegating to them the authority of a global administrator to manage their user group. More and more communication in companies is being transferred to instant messengers, but this is not safe from the point of view of storing and transmitting confidential information. The Team extension allows you to implement a full-fledged corporate chat with video calls support at the enterprise, while avoiding the transfer of confidential data to the side, as many people now have when using instant messengers WhatsUpp, Telegram and others.
Work with Zimbra
After all employees of the enterprise have received their Zimbra accounts, you can start using Zimbra for direct communication and interaction between employees. Zimbra / Zextras users have several communication channels available. In addition to email, they can take advantage of Zextras’s built-in web client online chat, as well as the audio and video calls that it supports.
In addition to communication, Zimbra users have access to a wide range of collaboration tools. For example, there are interactive calendars and diaries that, thanks to the Zextras Mobile extension, support synchronization with mobile devices. You can conveniently set up your work schedule in them, and the head of the department can organize meetings right in Zimbra, simply posting the relevant events on calendars, and also set tasks by placing them in the daily log of his subordinates. In this case, the head can indicate the timing of the task, as well as leave comments and receive notification of the task in order to more conveniently control subordinates.
Editing Documents in Zimbra
Another convenient tool in Zimbra is Drive . It allows you to use personal data storages, increasing their security, thanks to storage on the company's servers, without transferring it outside, as in OneDrive, DropBox and others. Employees can organize the documents they use, share links, including protected ones, with colleagues within the company and with partners. Thanks to Zextras Docs , Drive’s functionality grows significantly, and it becomes a complete document collaboration solution.
Zextras Docs is available to anyone who installs the Zextras Suite Pro extension set in Zimbra OSE. Let's try creating a text document in Zextras Docs and try to share it with a colleague so that we can work together on it. To do this, go to your Zimbra account, go to the “Drive” tab and click on the “New” button. Clicking on this button will open a drop-down menu where you can choose which document you want to create. You can choose from a text document, presentation and table. You can also create a new folder using this button.
Create a text file and write arbitrary text in it. Each new action is fixed by the system, thanks to which it will be possible not only to return to any stage of the document creation, but also to track the procedure for making changes to it, which helps those participants in the process who have joined it from the very beginning to fully join the editing process.
After the work on the document is completed, you can upload it as a text file. All the most popular standards are supported, including .docx. Documents created in Microsoft Excel, Word can be saved in LibreOffice formats, without loss of formatting, even complex, including images and tables. I tested saving an Excel file with several pages with internal links to the Calc LibreOffice format and also successfully. There is information that a number of advanced Microsoft business intelligence features are not supported by LibreOffice, but I have not encountered one yet. You can also share the file as a link to Zextras Docs. In a similar way, work is done with presentations.
All of these tools are enough to organize convenient and efficient work with documents even in a large enterprise with a large number of employees, because thanks to the Zextras Team, Zimbra and the company's contacts book, employees of different departments will be able to quickly solve work issues.
All of these tools are enough to organize convenient and efficient work with documents even in a large enterprise with a large number of employees, because thanks to the Zextras Team, Zimbra and the company's contacts book, employees of different departments will be able to quickly solve work issues.
Let's compare
Of course, Zimbra Collaboration Suite is not the only IT solution on the market that allows you to organize corporate communication and collaboration in the enterprise. The most popular competitors of Zimbra today are Office 365 from Microsoft, as well as MyOffice from the domestic developer "New Cloud Technologies". Let’s look at what these solutions offer us and try to compare them.
MS Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 is a collection of subscription web services and applications to access them. Thanks to the use of these services, it is possible to quickly and conveniently provide employees of the enterprise with e-mail, communication and collaboration tools, as well as office software for working with documents.
In order to get advanced MS Office 365 distributions for testing, you need to share information about your company with Microsoft. The Office 365 subscription model allows the company to plan the costs associated with maintaining the IT infrastructure, but note that Office 365 applications are not available on every operating system, which is why your company will likely have to fork out for licensing operating systems for workers places
A big plus is also a huge user community, which can provide all possible assistance in case of any problems. There are tons of chat rooms, groups, and forums about Microsoft products where you can always get help.
Many consider Office 365 to be a big plus for the presence of a package of widespread office programs - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint. But as we previously tested, the free LibreOffice package has the same capabilities and full compatibility with MS Office.
The main disadvantage of the solution is that it is located in Microsoft overseas data centers and the data of the company and its employees will be located and processed abroad. All this automatically leads to information and economic risks for the enterprise. In particular, despite the fact that Microsoft guarantees its customers 99.9% SLA for all services of the company, access to them is still carried out through the network of providers, the connection on which may break at any time and lead to a decrease in the productivity of the enterprise, or to its idle time.
Another important disadvantage of this solution is its insecurity. Today, due to its widespread use, Office 365 is one of the main targets of cybercriminals, and although Microsoft is making every effort to protect Office 365 users, this is far from always possible. For example, in August 2017, Office 365 multi-tenant administrative dashboard usernames and email addresses were leaked. In addition, the servers that form the basis of Microsoft Azure are not localized in Russia, which means that enterprises working with personal data of Russians will not be able to use Office 365.
However, the main risks were, are and remain the so-called “sovereign runet” and trade sanctions. At any time, as was the case during the Telegram persecution, Microsoft Azure servers may not be available, or Russian companies may be prohibited from using Microsoft services under sanctions. If such risks are realized, work at many enterprises can be literally paralyzed.
My office
MyOffice is a fully domestic development and, like MS Office 365, is a set of subscription-based web services and applications. This solution appeared on the market recently and is primarily focused on use in government agencies that seek to reduce their dependence on foreign software. At present, MyOffice can provide most of the business-requested tools for collaboration, file sharing and work with documents.
Among the key advantages of MyOffice is protection against risks associated with “sovereign runet” and sanctions. The product was specially created in order to replace Russian users of MS Office 365, which is rather unreliable from the point of view of information security and currently appears in several scandals related to the processing and storage of personal data. That is why MyOffice may be a suitable option for enterprises and organizations that are forced to implement only certified software and have a lot of security requirements from regulatory and law enforcement agencies, as well as from state security agencies.
Another advantage of the MyOffice solution is that, unlike MS Office 365, it can be deployed locally, while excluding access to any services located on the servers of the manufacturer MyOffice, as well as data transfer outside the information perimeter of the organization. At the same time, options for cloud and hybrid service deployment remain possible, which is ideal for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Another advantage of the solution is its low system requirements. The server part of the MyOffice solution. A private cloud can run on a server with an x86-64 processor 2 GHz, 3 GB RAM and 5 GB HDD. Also, since the server part of MyOffice runs on Linux, you can significantly save on licensing the operating system for the server. Also, the advantages include the full compatibility of MyOffice with domestic operating systems.
The disadvantages of MyOffice include poor functionality, closed source code and, as a result, a small number of users. In other words, if a problem arises, the system administrator is unlikely to be able to solve it on their own, as there are currently no lively forums or Wiki resources on MyOffice on the Internet, and the phrase “Contact me” as an answer to all the questions in the company's official FAQ technical support. " Also, the opportunity to independently modify the solution to your needs is lost.
A small user community also means that there are very few stories about the successful implementation of MyOffice. That is why you are unlikely to succeed in finding an enterprise similar to your company that would successfully implement MyOffice in production and, accordingly, conclude that. how much this solution suits you will not work until testing it directly, which is rather inconvenient.
In addition, you can’t just download MyOffice for testing just like that. In order to be able to get a version for testing, you must leave a request with local integrators, resellers and distributors, and only after the approval of your application you will receive the opportunity to test MyOffice.
Zimbra Collaboration Suite + Zextras Suite
Among all these solutions, Zimbra Collaboration Suite is the only one that is open source. Over its more than 15-year history, Zimbra has expanded its functionality, which is able to satisfy the needs for corporate communications and collaboration tools, not only small and medium-sized enterprises, but also large corporations, as well as government and educational institutions.
You can implement Zimbra in your enterprise either independently or with the help of SaaS providers that provide access to Zextras Suite as a service. Due to the fact that the server part is able to run on free Linux distributions, and the web client is cross-platform, using Zimbra on a private server in the organization can significantly reduce licensing costs compared to MS Office, for the deployment of which you need to purchase licenses for Windows Server, as well as licenses Windows for jobs.
Today in the world there are more than 500 million users of Zimbra, there are many stories of successful implementation in all sectors of the economy, a lively forum, many resolved issues, as well as a detailed Wiki knowledge base with a description of all the necessary functions and algorithms for solving various problems. We can say that today the solution for any problem related to the administration of Zimbra can be found on the Internet.
A big plus of Zimbra is its ease of scaling. As the load on the server grows, you can add new virtual or physical servers to the Zimbra infrastructure that will allow the service to remain available, despite the large number of users.
We invite you to the webinar!
December 10, 2019, 11:00
Let's talk about a new service that allows you to work with mail and documents, individually and with colleagues, in the office and outside it.
For whom:
- Digital workstations from Zextras and SBCloud are a modern alternative to the office, an effective solution for dynamic companies and their employees, reliable data protection and convenient business applications on the Russian cloud platform.
- Anyone interested in new approaches to job creation
- Owners and CEOs
- Heads of companies with a network structure (trading, service, production)
- Business Application Support IT Professionals
Important: special offer for webinar participants! 14 days of testing for free!
“Digital office for efficient business”
Registration link https://saas.sbcloud.ru/zextras