Vadim Chobanu

Recently I had a task of streamlining the contacts and team collaboration workflow. As the business grows, the usual outlook contacts, tasks and appointments are running out of functionality, so the natural choice was a good CRM solution. A custom software was probably the best thing, however the budget didn’t allow for it, so I began my homework on researching the ready made solutions available, ideally a free one or not more than £10 per month per user. I came across SalesForce free, which was integrating nicely with outlook, however I didn’t like that all my outgoing emails sent from CRM had the ’sent by salesforce on behalf of’, plus a few more downsides. The paid version obviously didn’t have this, so I felt like doing a bit more research before making any decisions. I came across a few more ready made free solutions, out of which SugarCRM seemed the next best choice at the time as they have an open-source community version, which means that all I have to worry is about hosting it myself. Sounded very promising, so I installed it on my server and then moved on to making it work with the email. The Community version has a slight downside – they didnt provide outlook integration, however there are a few 3-rd party softwares that do the same job, so next thing was to obtain a trial for them. As I am running windows 7, 2 of these applications didn’t seem stable enough, so I was about to give up and go back to salesforce. Then I came across another 3-rd party application which was integrating the CRM with exchange server, however the problem with it was the actual price – from $1400. No budget for that, sorry. Next! was I just about to say, when I found one more 3-rd party soft which was integrating contacts, tasks and calendar with an exchange-like-server called Zarafa and was free for up to three users. How handy I thought – we are three partners in the business, so we will even save some money by not paying for a hosted exchange solution each month.

As I never heard of such thing as ZARAFA before, and never even thought that there was an alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server, especially capable of running on both – Linux and windows servers… So there I began to read all the wiki’s, forums etc about this zarafa. It was all new to me, and it had some server pre-requisites such as: I had to use a certain version of php; some SOAP; and some LIBs of certain versions. So I needed a new server for that, as I have a few sites which need a different php version on the same box… However, thanks to the good wizards from Coreix - they sorted the problem by installing a virtual server (Open VZ) on top of my current one.

The next part was obviously to install and integrate everything together. Lets put it this way, it wasn’t the easiest job for me due to not being a Linux expert and never had setup a mail server before, so in total it took me about a week to do it all. It was quite challenging to integrate the first part – postfix with zarafa and spamassasin. The second part was even more challenging – to integrate zarafa with SugarCRM (this was so tough that I put the white flag up and asked for help in zarafa forums, where a very kind fellow saved me, thank you) The problem was that zarafa guides are written for Debian environment, and I was using Centos. As some of the paths of linux libraries are different on them 2 flavours, I needed professional expertise. Another challenge I had was the SPF and other spam fighting techniques to make sure that my emails do not go to junk – also a tough one to crack, thanks to Andreas again – cant think what would I have done without his help.

A few more days of troubleshooting and fine tuning of all this and now I am using a free own hosted Microsoft Exchange-like server on Linux which has:

• Webaccess client – very similar to outlook. Usual drag and drop of emails into folders, contacts, tasks, categories.
• Pushmail for my Windows Mobile Phone and my colleague’s Iphone.
• Fully functional Outlook client for my Windows machine. Has pretty much all the features that exchange server has and I can not tell that I am not connected to microsoft exchange.
• Server side synchronisation with the CRM software. When I add a task, contact, appointment or all in the CRM, it automatically appears in my outlook within the same minute. Same thing other way around unless I select for it to be private.
• Ability in the future to integrate with blackberry should I need to – the Professional and Enterprise versions of the server comes with it.

A few pictures below of the webaccess, outlook and sugarcrm: