Overview

SOGo offers multiple ways to access calendaring and messaging data. Your users can either use a web browser, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple iCal, or a mobile device to access the same information.

SOGo is a highly interoperable solution due to its adoption and promotion of open standards. Among those, SOGo particularly focuses on:

CalDAV: The Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV protocol is vastly popular among clients (Apple iCal, Mozilla Lightning, etc.) and allows them to exchange calendar components with servers that support it.
CardDAV: In its fourth revision, vCard Extensions to WebDAV is to address books / contacts what CalDAV is to calendaring. Less popular than CalDAV, it's nevertheless quickly gaining momentum and is used by the SOGo Connector extension.
Mail protocols: For messaging, SOGo fully makes use of standard protocols such as IMAP and SMTP.
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync: The de facto standard for synchronization of email, contacts, events, and tasks with mobile devices that use Apple iOS, Android, or Windows Phone.

Supporting open standards provides SOGo with extensive interoperability, scripting capabilities and more.

Thunderbird Extensions

Alinto has worked to make Mozilla Thunderbird the best Open Source, multi-platform, native client to SOGo. In order to reach this high level of interoperability, two extensions were developed for Thunderbird and its official calendaring complement, Lightning. Nonetheless, SOGo also supports other native clients such as Apple Calendar, Apple Contacts, Microsoft Outlook and any CalDAV and CardDAV client.

SOGo Connector

This extension makes Thunderbird a full DAV client for groupware servers such as SOGo.

  • Event organizers
  • CardDAV implementation for the address book
  • Support for WebDAV access control lists (ACL)

SOGo Integrator

This extension transforms Thunderbird in a pure heavy client for SOGo. Whereas the SOGo Connector is meant for portability (horizontal integration), the SOGo Integrator makes use of the features and layout of SOGo only (vertical integration).

  • Remote administration of folder subscriptions
  • Automatic replication of your local and subscribed folders
  • Automatic propagation of updates to chosen extensions from a local update server
  • Automatic propagation of default settings

SOGo Integrator is the perfect tool for managers of large-scale infrastructures who wish to easily deploy a native client on all of their users computers. With this extension, the amount of settings that the users have to configure is reduced to a minimum.

Microsoft Outlook

Using the Outlook CalDav Synchronizer plugin, Microsoft Outlook users can fully share emails, calendars and contacts with other SOGo users.

The Outlook CalDav Synchronizer is a free plugin which leverages the excellent WebDAV stack implementation of SOGo to provide Microsoft Outlook clients a fully featured communication channel with the SOGo solution.

Why use SOGo?

There are a number of reasons why SOGo should be your preferred groupware solution over alternatives such as Microsoft Exchange or Zimbra.

Costs

  • SOGo and all its related components are entirely free and released under the GPL (or LGPL/MPL)
  • Other solutions, like Zimbra, offer limited branding capabilities when using the "free" version
  • Microsoft Exchange and Zimbra can cost between 30 $US and 115 $US per user, per year, for environments as small as 1,500 users. This means you can pay between 44,000 $US and 105,000 $US per year in licensing fees. With the native Microsoft Outlook compatibility layer SOGo offers, you can connect all your Outlook 2003 to 2019 clients at no cost!
  • Other solutions that provide you with Microsoft Outlook compatibility require you to install and maintain complex MAPI connectors on all computers that use Outlook

Interoperability

  • SOGo supports and promotes open standards such as CalDAV, CardDAV, CalDAV auto-scheduling, WebDAV Sync, WebDAV ACLs and more
  • In SOGo, every single event, task, contact or email can be accessed through the DAV protocol. This provides excellent scripting capabilities
  • Apple extensions such as calendar colors, calendar delegation and more are well-supported, making SOGo a transparent Calendar and Contacts Server
  • SOGo allows any ActiveSync-compatible mobile device to easily synchronize mail, contacts, events, and tasks 

Ease of deployment

  • SOGo reuses your existing services such as Microsoft Active Directory, OpenLDAP, your SQL database, or even your IMAP server. By reusing those, SOGo prevents you from time-consuming data migration or directory services data duplication or synchronization problems
  • If you have little or no existing services, ZEG can be used for immediate deployments. ZEG will get you running in minutes
  • SOGo provides you with migration scripts from existing solutions and more scripts are being added

Modern/Integrated solutions

  • SOGo provides you with a coherent environment with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning
  • Its web interface is simple and professional looking. AJAX is not over-used like other solutions, which makes SOGo's web interface very fast
  • Solutions like DAViCal or Apple Calendar and Contacts Server provide no Web interface and no support for Microsoft Outlook

Performance

  • SOGo is very fast and uses few resources. SOGo is a compiled software so the required hardware footprint is very low
  • A single SOGo server can easily handle thousands of users
  • SOGo's speed not only comes from its elegant architecture but also from its use of an efficient and distributed cache mechanism

Ease of maintenance

  • SOGo is available as packages for multiple operating systems such as Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS
  • SOGo is also under active development and update processes are trivial and can be done with virtually no downtime

Features

SOGo provides all features required by organizations to satisfy their increasing and demanding user base.

Web Interface

Localized
SOGo is available in over a dozen languages so you'll always feel at home. If your language is missing, you can easily contribute to the project and submit your translation.
Reminders
Set alarms to important events and get alerted directly from your browser.
Delegation
Delegate access to your mail account or delegate an invitation to another person.
Resource Reservation
Define resources like projectors and conference rooms to automatically accept invitations for them while avoiding double-booking.
HTML
Compose HTML mail with the complete inline rich-text editor.
Mail Identities
Define custom mail identities and associate signatures to your addresses.
Mail Return Receipt
Request or answer to return requests to confirm the arrival of messages.
Forward and Auto-Reply
Set an auto reply while on vacation or forward all your incoming mail to one ore many alternate email addresses.
S/MIME
Sign and encrypt messages using your personal secure certificate. Automatically manage public certificates you receive by email.
Single Sign-On
Single sign-on (SSO) capabilities using CAS, WebAuth or Kerberos.
Sharing
Share your mail, calendars and address books with other users. Define specific rights to each person or group of persons.
Recurring Events
Define precise recurrence pattern for your repeating events and create exceptions if necessary.
Free/Busy Time
Before sending an invitation, see the free/busy periods of attendees, either from the local SOGo server or a remote Microsoft Exchange server. Automatically set off-hours as busy if you like.
Notifications
Be informed if someone modifies your calendar or automatically inform someone if your calendar changes.
Receive desktop notifications for events alarms and new mail messages.
Categories
Choose from a predefined set of categories or create your own categories and associate them to your events and contacts.
Multiple Mail Accounts
Configure all your mail accounts (IMAP) from SOGo and forget about login-in to multiple webmail services.
Mail Filtering
Define powerful server-side filters to automatically act on new messages. Forward, discard, reject, flag or move incoming mail depending on complex criteria.
Export/Import
Export calendars or import events from a vCalendar file. Export contacts to LDIF or import cards from a LDIF of vCard file. Export a mailbox to zip archive.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Protect your account from unauthorized access using an Authenticator app.
Password Policy
Define a variety of password control mechanisms, including password aging, account time-outs, mandatory password resets, acceptable password content, and even grace logins.

Native Clients

Desktop Clients

SOGo provides perfect integration with desktop clients such as:

Mozilla Thunderbird
Considered as the favored client to use with SOGo due to its tight integration using the SOGo Connector and Integrator extensions. With Thunderbird, one can easily share address books, calendars and emails with other SOGo users - all this due standard protocols such as CalDAV and CardDAV provided by SOGo.
Microsoft Outlook
Using the free and open source Outlook CalDav Synchronizer plugin, Microsoft Outlook users can share address books, calendars and emails with other SOGo users without relying on costly MAPI providers.
Apple iCal and AddressBook
Much like with Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple applications can benefit from SOGo's address books and calendars sharing capabilities with any other SOGo users.
ActiveSync compatible devices
Using the ActiveSync bundle developed by Alinto, any device that speaks ActiveSync can easily synchronized mails, calendars and addressbooks. Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Microsoft Outlook all natively support ActiveSync.

Mobile Devices

With SOGo, data access goes beyond the Web and native interfaces. SOGo supports virtually every mobile devices such as:

Apple iPhone/iPad
Devices are supported natively through the use of the CalDAV and CardDAV protocols, which are well supported by SOGo.
Windows Phone and Android
Devices can speak ActiveSync, which SOGo supports since version 2.2.0.

Server

Packages for your Linux Distro
Easily deploy SOGo by using provided standard operating system packages or by using the Zero Effort Groupware (ZEG) Appliance.
Components reusability
SOGo uses existing IMAP, SMTP, database and LDAP services. When not available, best breed ones can be used from the Open Source community such as Cyrus IMAP Server, Dovecot, OpenLDAP, Postfix, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Scriptable
SOGo offers DAV access to everything - calendars, addess books and even mails. This makes the application very scriptable and interoperable with third party applications.
Domain Segregation
Isolate users into domains, all from a single SOGo server.
Customizable
Ease of maintenance, evolution and customization using a templates-driven approach.
Scalable
SOGo is scalable to handle from a handful to hundreds of thousands of users. SOGo's architecture is perfectly horizontal so more servers can be easily added to handle the growth.
Compliance
Support and compliance with collaboration-oriented standards such as CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP ACL and more. SOGo supports the popular Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol.
Multiple Authentication Sources
Set as many authentication sources as you need, from either a LDAP repository or a SQL database.
Caching
SOGo uses memcached to cache results of your authentication sources and storage database, lightning the load on the resources.

Support

Support

The SOGo solution is well supported by a large community and by Alinto, which provides commercial support to clients all around the world. Extensive documentation is available as well as a FAQ for popular questions.