SOGo Presentation
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:
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
Native Clients
Desktop Clients
SOGo provides perfect integration with desktop clients such as:
Mobile Devices
With SOGo, data access goes beyond the Web and native interfaces. SOGo supports virtually every mobile devices such as:
Server
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.
