Andrew’s personal weblog

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.

I’ve finally migrated my corporate URL redirection service from an handwritten MSFT-IIS-ASP solution to a new BSD jailed system running a Drupal instance. The new solution empowers the Front Page, the Path Redirect and Web file Manager modules, and enables all authorized users to both maintain all the official URL redirects and manage a dedicated WebFM file repository, from anywhere their are working.

The base URL of the new service is http://go.valsania.it.

I had been spending some free-time to research a good  groupware server far less featured than an enterprise product (such as Microsoft Exchange, with whom I’ve some experience ). What I was looking for was a product which is able to:

• run on at least one type of BSD server platform;
• give a user experience similar to that of an Exchange system (e-mail, personal and shared contacts, calendar and tasks);
• be accessed using different types of desktop clients (such as Microsoft Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, web browsers or other free/open-sourced  products) over the web in a secure way (using SSL/TLS);
• integrate with an existing corporate directory service (Active Directory, Mac and authenticate using secure protocols, such as kerberos.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for that solution and, until now, it seemed that the only way to accomplish these goals was to build it using a few stand-alone products (SMTP and IMAP server for e-mail, web collaboration for groupware tasks, external authentication services, etc.). That was not what i was looking for, since one of my requirements was to maintain the administration cost as low as possible.

Same days ago I rediscovered the Communigate Pro platform, which seems to fit completely what are my needs: I’m giving it a try by creating a new service subdomain (see the CGP web interface at http://mail.bsd.valsania.it) and running it on a FreeBSD jail. It’s too early to say something sharp about it, but I feel that’s a great piece of software, built to perform and scale very well even in an enterprise or service provider environment, and I surely be glad to get deeper into that solution.

Few days have past from when I began to play with the most famous and feature-rich open sourced IP PBX. Obviously, I’m running it on my FreeBSD testing systems and, even if I’m in the beginnings, I can say that my impression about this software is very good: I feel like it was the “Sendmail” in the IP PBXes field, and that makes it very friendly to me!

I’ve also discovered many ways to give it a user-friendly graphic interface; I gave them a try, but they are too simple to be effectively useful in the environments I wish to make Asterisk working. I’ll go further and mybe I’ll tell you again as soon I’ll have a sharper vision about that.

At the time I’m writing, the dialplan I’ve wrote is enabling me to place calls between two offices in different locations, manage incorrectly typed extension numbers and support remote SIP and IAX connections to the central office system. I wish to complete the configuration of the voicemail module and implement call parking, conferencing and dial-by-name directory as soon as possible.