Kopano Groupware Core & Archiver 8.4.0 beta 1 is now available

September 26, 2017

Kopano Groupware Core provides the Groupware functionality of the Kopano stack in most cases sits at the heart of every Kopano environment and is therefore a key figure in our promise to deliver stability and extensibility of Kopano’s proven communication platform. Kopano Archiver consists of additional components that allow running Kopano Groupware servers dedicated on slower storage for archived messages whilst keeping them available transparently to the user.

Another leap in performance

We are very proud to release this new major version which includes some major improvements to overall performance. The list of performance-related changes include:

  • Speed up overall system performance by reduction of SQL queries
  • Drop of excessive locking in hot code paths
  • Removal of unnecessary, extra logon & logoff cycles for MAPI provider initialization
  • Improvement of S3 attachment backend by implementation of an entry cache

In benchmark’ed production environments these changes result in up to half the latency time for most of the operations done on the connection level. These benefits directly lead to improved performance for Kopano’s clients, such as Kopano WebApp, DeskApp, ActiveSync and therefore also KOE clients. In general, this reduces also the load on the Kopano Groupware Core environment. In average all-together these changes resulted in our benchmarks in ~23% less load and ~26% overall better speed.

HTML filtering on delivery

With this new feature the HTML representation of mails can be “cleaned” at delivery time. With this improvement in place, HTML clients can decide based on their configuration to choose the filtered HTML instead of the original stored HTML representation of the mail. This way, clients will be able to (configuratively) improve drastically in display time of E-Mails since these do not require to do all kind of security-related cleaning of arbitrary, potentially dangerous and malicious HTML content.

Many smaller improvements

Kopano Backup has received many extra capabilities such as:

  • Backup and Restore of also store-level ACL’s
  • Definition of Backup from specific nodes
  • New incremental mode for incremental backups to store in a separate directory

Kopano Search is now also capable of indexing also embedded messages recursively and Python Kopano has improved also in many areas, such as supporting the processing of appointment cancellations.

The Groupware Core packages now also include kopano-mr-accept.py and kopano-mr-process.py which are over the course of the next releases going to replace their corresponding PHP pendants and therefore remove the PHP dependency entirely within Groupware Core.

New admin utility

Our main configuration kopano-admin has received a complete, separately added kopano-cli, which will be the successor to kopano-admin in the future. Built on-top of our powerful python-kopano framework kopano-cli will replace kopano-admin as this new main configuration utility massively gains in extensibility, maintainability as well as it provides better integration options. If kopano-cli continues well, our goal is to replace kopano-admin somewhere between the 8.5.0 and 8.6.0 major release, so feedback is very welcome and our decision in which kopano-admin will be replaced is in majority based on the extended feedback we receive next to all our QA efforts.

Realized the small change?

With the release of 8.4 Kopano Core is now renamed to Kopano Groupware Core which represents the correct definition of what Groupware Core consists of. No worries, no changes other than the name have been made. Nothing is required from you to update and keep your environment running. Promised: None. :)

Feedback?

We are really looking forward to your feedback on this version as this will help us further improve and adapt Kopano Groupware Core and Kopano Archiver to fit your needs best. Let us know what you think by sending an email to , or posting over at the Kopano Forum.