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.
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Over the past months we have been busy cleaning and refactoring old code to prepare Kopano Groupware Core for future improvements such as the integrated RestAPI or the additional OpenID Connect provider.As a result of this we will be retiring support for Debian 7 (and distributions based on it, such as Univention 4.1) with this release.
To allow a smooth transition for customers on older distributions we continue to provide PHP 5 packages for all Kopano releases until the end of August 2018. Releases from September 2018 will not include PHP5 modules and only include php-mapi modules for PHP 7. For customers running on RHEL 6 or RHEL 7 we continue to provide php-mapi packages based on the PHP 7 version from the Red Hat Software Collections. In addition to these changes to our PHP modules we have also updated all our Python code to support Python 2 as well as Python 3, also here allowing smooth transition to distributions using Python 3 as their main python version.
kopano-cli has replaced kopano-admin as the primary tool for administration
Within the 8.4 release announcement we already told you about kopano-cli. While kopano-admin still is available as a fallback, we now want to recommend everyone to step over to kopano-cli for their daily commandline work and scripting activities. To ease the transition we have meanwhile also updated our administrator manual.
Community contributed features
Apart from changes integrated into Kopano Groupware Core to help downstream in pushing Kopano packages into the next Debian release we also received and integrated a patch for out of office based email rules contributed by a community user. This still requires a change to Kopano WebApp which will be picked up in one of the next WebApp releases.
Things to check after the upgrade
Back in Kopano Groupware Core 8.4 we have updated the remaining shell scripts in Kopano to use sh as an interpreter instead of bash. The way the config file of the autoresponder in Kopano is packaged could leave the old bashism in the config file leading to a failure when trying to send out an out of office message. Please have a look at our Knowledge Base for instructions on how to resolve this.
This release changes the default value of process_model for kopano-gateway and kopano-ical from fork to threaded. Based on internal tests with 5000 client connections this resulted in a 60% drop in memory usage. We are currently investigating a case where this change actually leads to a higher memory usage, due to old sessions not being cleaned up. See KC-988 for more details. If you’re also seeing an increase in memory usage the recommended action is to switch back to fork in the gateway.cfg and ical.cfg.
Feedback & Download
Kopano Groupware Core can be downloaded from the Kopano portal. The latest development version of KGC can be retrieved from the community download site. For a full overview of the changes, please refer to the changelog. You can find detailed setup instructions in the Kopano documentation and a condensed howto in the Kopano Knowledge Base.
We are looking forward to your feedback on this version, let us know what you think by sending an email to , or posting over at the Kopano Forum.
