When we added support for Scalix in YippieMove, we created a Virtual Machine in VMware. While the process of installing Scalix is quite straight-forward, there are some minor tricks to it (more info about adding support for Scalix in YippieMove is avaliable here). For instance, CentOS is not officially supported by Scalix (Enterprise). Because of that, you need to trick it into believing that you are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which is what CentOS is ‘based’ on).

Ok, let’s get started.

First, install CentOS 5.3 as normal. In the software selection, we only selected ‘Server’ and deselect everything else (why people run X-windows on a server is beyond me). The only other thing to keep in mind is to use a static IP and a fully qualified domain name (FQDN).

Once you got your system up and running, we need to make a few changes to the default setup. Login using SSH or the console and run:

# system-config-securitylevel-tui

You will need to disable ‘SELinux’ as well as configuring the firewall according to your needs.

Next we need to trick Scalix into believing that you are running RHEL instead of CentOS. This is pretty easy:

# cp /etc/redhat-release /etc/redhat-release.orig
# echo ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)’ > /etc/redhat-release

We also need to make sure your hostname is listed in /etc/hosts under its IP (and not under 127.0.0.1). An example of a proper line is :

xxx.yyy.zzz.nnn server.example.org server

Now, let’s get started with installing Scalix. We start by upgrading the system and installing a few dependencies.

# yum -y upgrade
# yum install -y tk cyrus-sasl-md5 cyrus-sasl-plain sendmail-cf postgresql-server postgresql-libs mx compat-libstdc++-296

Assuming you’ve already downloaded Scalix onto the machine, all you need to launch the installer

# chmod +x scalix-11.4.4-GA-enterprise-redhat-intel.bin && ./scalix-11.4.4-GA-enterprise-redhat-intel.bin

After you are done answering all the questions, you should be able to access your brand new Scalix installation from your browser.

Good Luck!

Update: As Michael points out, the step of ‘tricking Scalix that you are running RHEL’ is not necessary. Thanks Michael.

Update 2: If you want to take Scalix for a spin without actually having to install it, we have created a Virtual Machine with Scalix installed that can be downloaded here.

Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: Email, guide, Linux, Scalix

We have today added support in YippieMove for the popular groupware Scalix. We are proud to add Scalix to our long list of supported groupware, which includes other popular solutions, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange and Zimbra.

“Adding support for Scalix was pretty straight forward. It basically came down to filtering out a few unsupported IMAP flags,” says Alexander Ljungberg, head of YippieMove’s software development team.

With Scalix added to the list of supported groupware, YippieMove now supports migrating emails between all major groupware. Combine that with our Batch Migration service and jumping from one groupware to another could not get easier.

Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: Scalix, YippieMove

Today when I logged into Google Docs I discovered that I had a new document. With Google Doc’s collaboration feature, this is nothing shocking. What was weird was the following:

• I don’t know the person who shared the document
• I never received any notification regarding the document

When looking closer I saw something really interesting. The document was shared with ‘Everyone.’ I immediately became curious about this and tried to replicate this myself, which I unfortunately failed.

I have no idea what the person sharing the document did to accomplish this, but it’s a quite serious problem. Somehow I do not think the person sharing the document intended to share it with ‘Everyone.”

After talking to a few other Google Docs users, the document does not appear to be shared with everyone. Please let us know if you see the same document in your Docs too.

Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: Google Docs, security, web

As YippieMove has grown a lot in the past few months, we’ve come to a point where simply sharing a mailbox among the Support Team just won’t cut it anymore. We needed retire the ‘shared mailbox’-approach for a more sophisticated and modern ticket management system.

After spending numerous hours researching various open source support solutions, we realized that none of them were really up to for the challenge. Most of them felt very outdated and cumbersome (like OTRS). A few of them looked promising, but lacked the maturity to use in production. We reached the conclusion that we could not use any free tool, so we started looking into the next best thing — A modern SaaS Help Desk.

It did not take very long until we realized that there was one solution that fitted our needs better than all the other options, namely Zendesk. After signing up for a free trial, we were completely sold. The modern interface, the ability to integrate it into YippieMove with a sub-domain (support.yippiemove.com) and ability to customize the look and feel really impressed us. What made us even more impressed was how easy it was to integrate it into our existing system. It took us less than 6 hours to switch from our old system to have a production ready help desk that even features Single Sign-On (thanks to Jon Gales Django hack). Quite frankly, Zendesk exceeded our expectations.

The only thing we could possibly complain about Zendesk is the pricing (it a bit steep) and the lack of SSL in the lower-tier plans.

Screenshots

Single Sign-on with YippieMove	Administrator home
End-user start

Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: helpdesk, SaaS, support, YippieMove

If you didn’t catch our tweet a few hours back, we are now successfully moved to the new servers. We’ve started to resume all paused transfers. So far it’s looking great. The speed of the transfers has gone up a lot, which is great.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you.

Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: maintenance, YippieMove