Zentyal announces Zentyal Server 3.5

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.

Availability

Zentyal Server 3.5 is released under the GPLv2 license and is freely available for download at: http://www.zentyal.org/download/

The Zentyal Server source code is available at: https://github.com/Zentyal/zentyal/