[horde] Newbie to Horde with Ambitions

[Jens Hellermann]

Dear Horde List Members.

I'm a total newbie to Horde Groupware and I put quite some hopes into 
this amazing open source product. So maybe I'll give you some rough 
specs of my environment and my project target first:

I took over my current IT job a year ago, and faced a mixed client 
environment of Windows 7 and Mac OSX clients which were connected to 
several servers. File sharing based mainly on two gentoo linux machines 
with SAMBA 4 but without Active Directory \ LDAP configuration. Emails 
were just fetched from the povider using mostly pop3 and sometimes imap 
without any backup or archiving methods on the side of the provider (nor 
in the company).

The hardware of the servers was more than 5 years old, whereas the 
client situation was good with mostly renewed, standardized and up to 
date workspaces.

Expectations brought to me where quite high bringing in new ideas and 
functionality to the environment. Mainly educated as a classical Windows 
system administrator I decided to introduce following changes:

- introducing a virtualisation environment (I chose Proxmox VE wich is 
momentarily on newest Version 3.4) connected to a NAS System via ISCSI 
and NFS shares to devide the virtualisation platform from the data
- introducing Active directory based on SAMBA 4
- introducing a groupware emails server with central calendar management 
(decision for linux based one, as exchange doesn't work well with the 
Mac OSX clients)
- introducing a new backup with local and cloud storage via crashplan

Almost everything went quite well, but the groupware server I chose 
caused to much trouble from the very begining. It turned out that 
allthough I had tested the basic functionality before introducing it, 
while doing so several functions like connecting to outlook clients 
failed with the complexity of the migrated data. (result: workaraound, 
workaround and oh yeah, let's work around this one, too)
Later it tuned out, that the calendar functions are insufficient and 
faulty. I don't want to name this product here, as I wish these people 
much luck in further development. Enough to say I want to get it out of 
my network asap.

Therefore I installed Horde Webmail 5.2.7 in a container virtualisation 
based on a lighttpd turnkey linux 13.01 Debian template (following the 
official installation manual). With the help of this document: 
https://www.skelleton.net/2013/05/12/installing-horde-5-and-configuring-it-for-active-directory-and-dovecot/ 
I managed to connect to the active directory server for authentication 
and connecting to the imap (Dovecot) and smtp (Postfix) server of my 
momentary groupware.

So my target is to firstly let horde take over the groupware functions 
instead of the existing one (to put my coworkers into a satisfying 
working state asap) and then migrate SAMBA 4 and Dovecot to new vitual 
machines, to finally be able to turn off the old groupware server.

The mysql database is up and running and is shown as completely 
configured in the administrative interface, so the basic configuration 
seems to be fine. But still I'm facing some small problems on my way.

So to everyone who read so far: my greatest thanks for following up on 
my difficulties aaannnd here comes a list of my momentary and futurely 
problems with this migration, everyone feel free to pick a matter of his 
or her choice and hopefully reply instead of framing it and putting it 
to the wall :)

1. Allthough the sql database is working and I can store the global 
preferences in it (like time and date format, language selection and so 
on), these preferences never become applied to the web interface. Even 
when I just lock on choosing German as my prefered language the 
interface is still in English. There is no error message concerning 
this, I get a green little screen saying configuration stored and the 
made changes show up sucessfully on the next login.

2. Manipulating a imp/backends.local.php didn't work at all, I believe 
I'm not the only one with that issue.

3. I donot manage to reach the ldap authentication through to the mail 
interface (user not configured for mail). I manipulated the 
imp/backends.php and tried the following:

    Horde only accepts the normal domain username as credentials but my
    IMAP Server only accepts email and password (which is the same like
    the AD password). Non of the hordeauth settings can successfully
    route me through to the webmail interface without having to
    authenticate again using the email address.

    $servers['imap']['disabled'] = true;
    $servers['advanced']['disabled'] = false;
    $servers['advanced']['hordeauth'] = true;

    are activated. ACL setting doesn't make a difference.

4. I realised, that allthough ldap configuration is successfull and all 
users can be listed, in the details of the user the email-adress is 
never visible. Might this be the reason why above email authentication 
is not working?

5. I'll need to migrate all calendar data from the old groupware to 
horde. Subscription to the existing calendars in Horde via CalDAV is 
successfull. Does someone know an elegant way to copy all calendar 
entries to the user calendar, so it will be stored in the horde mysql 
database?

I'm sure there are more questions to come, but maybe it is better to 
wait for the reactions on this email first. I'd like to offer a potatoe 
for this long email, but I'm not sure if everyone knows 9gag here. Also 
I din't understand that joke until today. (And by now I'm to afraid to ask.)

Best regards, Jens.