Zentyal Development Team today announced Zentyal Server 3.5, a new release of the Zentyal Linux small business server. Zentyal Server aims at offering small and medium businesses (SMBs) a native drop-in replacement for Windows® Small Business Server and Microsoft® Exchange Server, that can be set up in less than 30 minutes and is both easy-to-use and affordable.
Zentyal Server 3.5 release focuses on providing a stable server edition with simplified architecture. Therefore, the release comes with a single LDAP implementation based on Samba4, helping to solve a number of synchronization issues caused by having two LDAP implementations in the earlier editions. In addition, a number of modules have been removed in order to focus on Zentyal Server’s goal: Offer a drop-in replacement for Windows Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange Server.
In this regard, Zentyal Server 3.5 release has also focused on providing improved Microsoft Exchange Server replacement based on the OpenChange technology. Besides a number of minor improvements, the release features support for Microsoft Outlook 2010 and automatic Inbox refresh with recent versions of Microsoft Outlook.
Technical features
Zentyal Server 3.5 comes with improved LDAP integration based solely on Samba4 and improved native interoperability with Microsoft® Exchange Server. It is based on the latest Ubuntu LTS distribution (Ubuntu 14.04) and offers greater stability thanks to the removal of modules that fall out of the focus of a “small business server” or were little-used.
New features and improvements include:
Improved LDAP integration based only on Samba4 (synchronization with OpenLDAP was removed)
Distribution upgrade from Ubuntu Server 13.10 to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS
Support for Microsoft Outlook 2010
Automatic Inbox refresh with recent versions of Microsoft Outlook
Removed modules include:
L7 filter
FTP
Zarafa
User Corner
Captive Portal
Bandwidth Monitor
Upgrading
Automatic migration path from Zentyal 3.4 to Zentyal 3.5 will be provided shortly. The migration not only affects Zentyal Server, but also involves a Ubuntu base distribution upgrade (from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04). The migration process will be made available in a few weeks in order to consolidate the scenario.
