Kopano Groupware Core provides the Groupware functionality of the Kopano stack and in most cases sits at the heart of every Kopano environment. It 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.
Still using Zarafa? Upgrade to Kopano now!
In our effort to modernize, refactor and cleanup the code base of Kopano Groupware Core we recently removed old database migrations from our code base. As a result of that Kopano Groupware Core 8.4 will be the last Kopano version that supports a direct upgrade from Zarafa 7.1 and earlier. Upgrades to our current nightly builds and the upcoming Kopano Groupware Core 8.5 either need to go through Zarafa 7.2 or Kopano Groupware Core 8.4.
Another leap in performance
We are very proud to release this new 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 benchmarked 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 also reduces the load on the Kopano Groupware Core environment. On average, these changes all together resulted in our benchmarks in ~23% less load and ~26% overall better speed compared to 8.3.x.
Ease of administration
To help administrators managing standard tasks with Kopano, we’ve included multiple scripts to Groupware Core so they are immediately available for use:
- kopano-localize-folders – Allows the re-localization of the store to the preferred language
- kopano-fix-ipm-subtree – Repairs a potentially broken Mailbox root, in case a broken client has left the store in an inconsistent state
- kopano-recreate-systemfolders – Provides the ability to recreate default system folders
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 can (configurably) improve drastically in display time of e-mails since these do not need to do all kinds of security-related cleaning of arbitrary, potentially dangerous and malicious HTML content.
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 in providing 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. Feedback is very welcome and our decision on which kopano-admin will be replaced is in majority based on the extended feedback we receive next to all our QA efforts.
Preview of new automatic meeting request handling
But kopano-cli is not the only long-term functionality that has recently been ported to make use of python-kopano. Kopano Groupware Core 8.4 will also be the first release to include new ports of kopano-mr-process and kopano-mr-accept (used to automatically put meeting requests as tentative into the users calendar or respectively accepting or declining meeting requests for resources). To give customers the choice between the php and python variant we will continue shipping both and for 8.4 still fall back to the php versions.
If you want to give these two new scripts a try you can do so by adding the following two lines to your dagent.cfg:
mr_autoaccepter = /usr/sbin/kopano-mr-accept.py
mr_autoprocessor = /usr/sbin/kopano-mr-process.py
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.
Debian 9 officially supported / Last release for Debian 7
With this new mayor release of Kopano we also updated the list of supported platforms to include support for Debian 9. As per our support lifecycle, we support a maximum of two major releases for every platform, which in turn means that Kopano 8.4 will also be the last release to include packages for Debian 7 (and subsequently Univention 4.0 and 4.1).
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. :)
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.
