Monthly Archives: August 2008

CommuniGate in production

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The migration process I began some days ago to the new CommuniGate Pro platform has successfully completed today. Surely, a lot of things might be improved, but all the majour features needed by our internal corporate usersare just available.

Some troubles were encountered in porting old calendar and contact data from the old system, but we have managed to fill all the gaps we encountered by now. The new system will allow us to consolidate both asyncronous and syncronous collaboration services (such as mail, calendar, contacts, presence, IM and even VoIP) into one single, robust, dependable, highly scalable and secure Unix server.

We are trying the Mailshell SpamCatcher plugin to filter the spam remaining after all incoming messages have been inspected by our Sendmail frontend servers, and it seems to be quite a good alternative to the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter which is based on Microsoft’s SmartScreen technology.

This work makes up the biggest step towards a broader migration process to technologies and products out the Microsoft’s world, since the Redmond’s software house missed the promise to bring its customers to reliable but cost effective IT solutions. Quite all today’s products from Microsoft are unreliable and cost-prone both in implementation and management terms.

CommuniGate upcoming

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Today I officially began the path towards the migration from Microsoft Exchange to the Stalker’s CommuniGate Pro platform. A lot of time has past since I discovered this piece of software, but what I learned about it in the past months has convinced me to put it in production. CommuniGate has a lot of strenght points which make it a good alternative (even better on many aspects) to the Microsoft’s mail server. I can’t obviously write them all now, but the reliability gained by this software’s architecture (which comes from simplicity) can be enough to persuade a lot of Exchange2k7-sceptic sysadmins to give a look at it.

I’m currently running CommuniGate 5.2.6 on a FreeBSD 7.0/amd64 jail. By now on, all SMTP traffic flow from/to my corporate domains is routed by this server. As soon as I go on the migration process, all contents from Exchange private and public stores will be gradually moved to CGP, until the Exchange host will be left emptied and will be decommissioned. Corporate users whose mailbox has been migrated can already use the new Pronto! web interface by using the URL https://mail.valsania.it/Pronto.

First WPMU upgrade

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Today I got the time to upgrade the WordPress MU platform which is running the Valsania Corporate Blogs collection from version 1.5.1 to the release 2.6 (which is based on WordPress 2.6). It has been the first time I upgrade a WPMU instance in a production envirnoment. The upgrade procedure has been extremely straightforward, and I must say I’m quite impressed by that, since my WPMU configuration is very complex (many plugins and customizations were made, but all of them should have been made consistently with the architecture). At the same time I got all the others WP-based blogs I manage upgraded to the 2.6.1 release.