[PLUG] question on system

Tyrell Jentink tyrell at jentink.net
Thu Sep 20 14:12:47 UTC 2018


It's been several years since I looked into this... Like others have said,
the administrative overhead is substantial, and I ultimately decided that
it was just easier and more reliable (for my needs) to use Google.

That said... The top product I was looking at at the time was Kolab,
http://kolab.org, and it SEEMS to meet many of your requirements...

I consider it unlikely that a company of this size would be served by any
single application... If I were setting up Kolab for a client, a good
amount of energy would have to be put into questions like "How do we manage
users?" And "How do we manage storage?" And "How do we manage backups?"

Like, maybe you will find that managing lots of users pushes you into
needing an LDAP server, possibly with Single Signon. As you add these
"Supporting" services, your security footprint increases, and you may need
additional firewall and intrusion detection software; Maybe these services
should be on "Bastion Servers," individual servers for each service to
increase both performance and security... Maybe you virtualized some.

Maybe those questions lead to non-Linux answers... Maybe you find managing
the workstations of all those users works best with ActiveDirectory rather
than OpenLDAP; Maybe you find that managing the storage requires something
more robust than LVM on XFS or EXT4... And then is Kolab's file sharing
(WebDAV, if I remember correctly) enough for your users? Adding SMB and NFS
can have unintended complications.

And all of those questions have to be balanced against the inherent feature
creep that comes from wandering down this road.

For many companies, the answer is to simply let Someone Else do it...
Often, that Someone Else is Google.

On Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 13:40 logical american <website.reader3 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello again:
>
> Can anyone suggest a linux system server which will successfully do the
> following?
>
> 1. successfully imitate and replace the Google Groups program
> 2. successfully imitate and replace the Google gmail server
> 3. allow Google drive operations or simulate those operations
>
> I am seeking to move a large group of users (200-500) from Google Groups
> and gmail over to a stand-alone server and provide some type of Google
> drive functionality also for them, but at a bare minimum a common area
> to download files must exist so users can store their files.
>
> What would you suggest?
>
> The users are in the public domain.
>
> Thanks for the input
>
> - Randall
>
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