Software Update: Zarafa Collaboration Platform 6.40.9 / 7.0.0rc2

Zarafa can be seen as an open source counterpart to Microsoft Exchange Server and is thus able to handle e-mail, calendar and webmail functions. In addition, it offers a full MAPI stack, which allows a Microsoft Outlook client to communicate without any problems. For more information, please refer to this page. The developers have released version 6.40.9 and the second release candidate of 7.0.0 with the following announcements:

Zarafa collaboration platform 6.40.9 Final release

Dear Zarafa users,

We are pleased to announce the final release of the ZCP 6.40.9 final. In this short track version we did one more bug fix for the final release. A segfault multiple people reported should be fixed with this version.

The changelog is located at:
http://download.zarafa.com/community/final/6.40/changelog-6.40.txt

Information about installation, updating & configuration can be found in the Administrator manual:
http://doc.zarafa.com/6.40/Administrator_Manual/en-US/html-single/index.html

You can find the download of the final on our download page here:

You can find the tickets in Trac:
http://trac.zarafa.com

You feedback here on this forum is appreciated very much.

sincerely,
Zarafa QA

Release Notes – Edition 7.0

The Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) combines the usability of Outlook with the stability and flexibility of a Linux server. It features a rich web-interface, the Zarafa WebAccess, and provides brilliant integration options with all sorts of clients including all most popular mobile platforms. Most components of ZCP are open source, licensed under the AGPLv3, can therefore be downloaded freely as ZCP’s Community Edition. Several closed source components exist, most notably:

• the Zarafa Windows Client providing Outlook integration,
• the Zarafa BES Integration providing Blackberry Enterprise Server connectivity,
• the Zarafa ADS Plugin providing Active Directory integration, and
• the Zarafa Backup Tools.

These components, together with several advanced features for large setups and hosters, are only available in combination with a support contract as part of ZCP’s Commercial Editions. Alternatively there is a wide selection of hosted ZCP offerings available worldwide. This document, the release notes, will describe all new features and architecture changes in the ZCP.

Changes for end users

• Unicode support
  The largest change in ZCP 7.0 is the full support for UTF-8 (unicode) in all components. Which means ZCP can now be used in Eastern Europe, Asia and other parts of the world.
• Send from Openoffice
  ZCP 7.00 offers a direct integration with Openoffice. With the integration WebAccess users, can configure the WebAccess as the default email client in Openoffice. When sending an document per email directly from Openoffice, the Zarafa WebAccess will be automatically opened and the document will be uploaded. To improve the usability of this feature, installers have been created for the Windows, SLES and Ubuntu desktop platforms.
• Outlook changes
  The ZCP 7.0 release doesn’t contain any new Outlook features, except for the UTF-8 support in the Zarafa Windows Client.
• WebAccess changes
  The Zarafa WebAccess is extended with the option to add items from the mailbox to a new email, which is also called message in message.

Changes for Administrators

• New packaging layout
  To make it easier for Administrators to deploy specific components of ZCP on the servers, the packaging layout is changed in ZCP 7.0
• Unicode backend support
  All ZCP components are UTF-8 (unicode) compatible in ZCP 7.0. Unicode offers support for 109000 characters and is expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. Not only folders and items with unicode characters can be used, but also user information can be created in UTF8. Zarafa offers an upgrade procedure for existing users of ZCP. Please check the Administrator Manual for more information about upgrading an existing ZCP installation.
• Improved IMAP gateway
  To offer a better compatibility for users with generic IMAP clients like Mac Mail and Thunderbird, the Zarafa Gateway is rewritten in ZCP 7.0. The new IMAP gateway offers a new configuration option to store more message information, like the envelope information, bodystructure and whole RFC822 message. By storing this extra information, the gateway doesn’t have to do a conversions from MAPI to RFC822, which will speed up the gateway tremendously. Not only a major speed improvement is realized with this option, but also the following issues will be solved:
  • Support for PGP/mime emails
  • Support for s/mime encrypted emails
  • All message headers can be retrieved

  The gateway is also extended with the following capabilities:

  • Quota support: to view your mailbox size and quota in your IMAP client
  • UIDplus support: to reduce the amount of time and resources used by some client operations
• IO improvements
  ZCP 7.0 has some major database changes to realize a higher IO performance and support more concurrent users on a single Zarafa Server. The largest database architecture changes in the introduction on a new table called tproperties. This table will contain all mapi properties which will be displayed when opening view in the client, for example the calendar week view or the inbox view. During the upgrade process this table will be filled with all required mapi properties of existing data. In large email environments this process can take some time. All other mapi properties like bodies, headers are still stored in the properties table. For upgrading previous Zarafa versions and database conversions, please read the upgrade section of these release notes.
• Python MAPI binding
  The Python language binding provides a python interface to the messaging API used by Zarafa, MAPI. The original interface is an object-oriented C++ interface, and the interfaces provided to Python are designed to be completely analogous to the C\++ interface. Various tools and utilities can be created using these interfaces, allowing for interfacing, extentions and custom applications.
• New Zarafa admin changes
  The Zarafa-admin tool could already list orphant mailbox and hook an orphant mailbox to a user. In ZCP 7.0 it’s also possible to unhook a store of a user. zarafa-admin –unhook-store
  To publish the zarafa cache statistics to terminal and replacing the former SIGUSR1 signal, the statistics can now only be displayed by using: zarafa-stats –system
  The use of the SIGUSR2 signal was removed in favor of a new command in line with other administrative command structures, to clear the internal zarafa cache issue the command. zarafa-admin –clear-cache
  The new performance improvements in ZCP 7.00 will introduce a deferred updates table, which contains items before they are actually written to the properties table. To purge this defered table manually, the zarafa-admin tool can be executed with the following option. zarafa-admin –purge-deferred
  To get an easy overview of available and used subscriptions, the zarafa-admin is extended with the following option. zarafa-admin –user-count
  To force a full resync of an Outlook caching mode profile, the zarafa-admin is extended with the following option. zarafa-admin –force-resync
  After executing this command all items on the server for this user will be downloaded again in the caching mode profile.
• Lucene indexer improvements
  The Zarafa server’s Lucene indexer was extended to support search in Public stores and delegate stores. Using these improvements the content is pre-indexed and searching these folders does not directly impact the database, allowing for searches on folders with much content. Also the speed of indexing process of attachments is improved, and allows for exclusions of specified MIME and extension attachment types.
• Zarafa-dagent debug option
  The Zarafa day is extended with a debug option. When enabling the option the raw RFC822 email file of all incoming is stored in the specified directory. When the delivery fails or the email has a strange format after the delivery, Zarafa Support will ask often for raw email files to further debug the issue. With the option saving the raw emails files will be much easier.
• Sync GAB real-time
  To optimize performance with large Global Address Books in ldap configurations a setting sync_gab_realtime is optional in server.cfg configuration file. When set to yes, zarafa will synchronize the local user list whenever a list of users is requested (eg during zarafa-admin -l or when opening the addressbook). This was the default for zarafa 6.40.4 and earlier versions. When setting this value to no, synchronization will only occur during zarafa-admin –sync. This is useful for setups which have large addressbooks (more than 5000 entries in the addressbook). When using the cache option, the server.cfg option cache_userdetails_size needs to have a sufficient size set, eg 128000000. This option is forced to yes when using the db plugin since synchronization is implicit in that case.
• Security logging
  To store log security details of mailbox access by others then the owner the enhanced security logging may be activated. This can be used to eg look for suspicious activity by users that have specific rights. The settings for this feature have been added to server.cfg using the parameters audit_log_enabled, audit_log_method (supporting syslog or file), the loglevel using audit_log_level and the audit_log_timestamp option. The security logging was implemented using a 2 stage approach, storing essential information in syslog or file, and when required reading the logging with the use of a supplied log parser script.
• User access control
  The ZCP user plugins are extended with user access control. At the moment the POP3 and IMAP service can be enabled or disabled per user. When the IMAP/POP3 service is enabled for the user the extra IMAP/POP3 data will be stored. The /etc/zarafa/server.cfg has the new configuration option disabled_features. With this option globally imap/pop3 access can be controlled. This option can be overruled by the user plugin. When the ldap plugin is used, the access control will be stored in the attribute zarafaEnabledFeatures and zarafaDisabledFeatures. These multi-valued properties can contain any string, but only the features Zarafa knows about will actually be provided through the system. The values ​​that can be currently used are imap and pop3. In Active Directory the Zarafa plugin is extended with an additional tab.