Scalix: Linux Administrator's Guide: Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server [Paperback]

Markus Feilner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 2008

Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server. This book is written for Linux administrators who wish to set up an email server for businesses or who wish to switch to Scalix from another email server. Scalix can be used very easily by beginners; however, advanced strategies and administrative tasks are difficult to learn and this book will help you master them all.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Markus Feilner

Markus Feilner is a Linux professional from Regensburg, Germany, and has been working with open-source software since the mid 1990s. His first contact with UNIX was a SUN cluster and SPARC workstations at Regensburg University (during his studies of geography). Since the year 2000, he has published several documents used in Linux training all over Germany. In 2001, he founded his own Linux consulting and training company, Feilner IT.

He was working as a trainer, consultant, and systems engineer at Millenux, Munich, where he focused on groupware, collaboration, and virtualization with Linux-based systems and networks.

Since 2007, he is an editor at the German Linux-Magazine, where he is writing about Open-Source-Software for both printed and online magazines, including the Linux Technical Review and the Linux Magazine International. He regularly holds speeches and lectures at conferences in Germany.

He is interested in anything about geography, traveling, photography, philosophy (especially that of open-source software), global politics, soccer and literature, but always has too little time for these hobbies.

Markus Feilner supports Linux4afrika - a project bringing Linux computers into African schools.

Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847192769
• ISBN-13: 978-1847192769
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,449,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars so this is what happened to HP Open Mail, May 16, 2008

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scalix: Linux Administrator's Guide: Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server (Paperback)

Some of us remember using HP Open Mail in the early 90s. Very stable, and with the ability to scale up to many users. The book describes its strange journey, and how it morphed into something called Scalix. Perhaps you might agree with Feilner's characterisation of HP's marketing of Open Mail as being defined by a too-close relationship with Microsoft, and a reluctance by HP to position Open Mail as a direct competitor to Exchange. His account of Open Mail's travails is backed up by excerpts from contemporaneous accounts in the technical press.

Anyway, here we are today with Scalix. How does it look? The book describes a sophisticated GUI that lets the sysadmin easily handling managing a large email server. One immediate advantage is that the GUI lets you avoid direct editing of what Feilner calls the "horrible" sendmail syntax of the sendmail configuration files. Good. I was once a sysadmin of unix boxes, and sendmail had the well deserved reputation of being the most complicated package to manage. Its syntax is indeed dreadful, and if you know nothing of this because you use Scalix, you are fortunate.

Another very useful advantage of Scalix over a default sendmail is a more efficient holding of messages. Sendmail sends copies of a message to each recipient's mail file. As far as I know, there is no way with sendmail to avoid this. But Scalix uses a totally different storage approach, that avoids this replication. It lets Scalix scale up to handle more users and messages than sendmail.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poor LDAP integration chapter, July 27, 2008

By 

Ossama Khayat - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scalix: Linux Administrator's Guide: Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server (Paperback)

I bought this book for the sake of integrating Scalix with OpenLDAP. Unfortunately, the integration chapter included talks very briefly about this and doesn't even have an example of how to use the most important tool omldapsync with OpenLDAP. I will get back to the Scalix wiki.

3.0 out of 5 stars It's OK as a start, could have been much better, maybe better in the 2nd edition?, June 18, 2009

By 

Stephanie Sullivan (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Scalix: Linux Administrator's Guide: Install, configure, and administer your Scalix Collaboration Platform email and groupware server (Paperback)

It's a good starting point, provides some examples, but in the end left me wanting for much more. Much of the focus is on installation - but that's one of the easiest things. I really would prefer more emphasis on the details of creating and using shared resources, delegating authority, etc.

I think Scalix has great potential that might be realized with excellent administrators and end user's documentation. This impressive product does a great deal very well indeed.