The Carbonio Community Edition isn’t just an email system anymore. This is the collaboration platform you need. Maybe you are using different tools to create your collaborative environment right now. For example, one system for email/contacts/calendar, one for instant messaging, one as a file server, etc. In Carbonio CE 23.12.0, we have assembled all the pieces a user may want in a collaboration system.
Let’s dive into the multitude of features and technical enhancements meticulously incorporated into Carbonio CE version 23.12.0. Brace yourself for a detailed exploration – it might be a tad extensive, but rest assured, it’s anything but boring. Ready to embark on this journey with us?
The Architecture
Let’s start with the architecture and then dive into the features.
You may see many known components, but what makes this architecture a novelty? What makes these components work more efficiently than any traditional, open-source email system?
The Carbonio Mesh Technology (The Consul Service)
A service mesh is a specialized network layer facilitating secure service-to-service communication across various infrastructures, encompassing both on-premises and cloud environments. A service mesh offers several advantages widely adopted by major microservice-based cloud platforms. These include:
- efficient service discovery in multi-server installations
- comprehensive system component health monitoring
- load balancing
- traffic management
- encryption
And a lot of other critical functionalities.
Explore the robust capabilities of a service mesh for seamless and secure microservices communication in diverse computing environments.
Carbonio CE is the only system that integrated such a state-of-the-art mechanism into a free, open-source, community edition collaboration solution.
Let’s see how Carbonio CE improved traditional features while adding new ones.
The Features
- Webmail Interface – The react-based webmail interface allows faster rendering than other frameworks. It significantly reduces page loading time and improves your accessing experience.
- Email – The Carbonio CE Mails module is loaded with many perks along with the primary email transaction facility. Let’s take a look at some of them.
- Users can use Filter Rules and different folders to keep their Inbox tidy and Tags to filter/search emails.
- Users can share their account resources (Email/Calendar/Contacts) with other users.
- A new email editor uses the browser’s capability to check the spelling and save you from any awkward and unwanted situation.
- The email editor warns you if you miss adding a subject, email body, or even the mentioned attachment. Users can also Request read receipts from the recipient for acknowledgment and clarification.
- Set the OOO (Out-of-office) period and the reply at your convenience.
- Create Different Persona (Display Name) and Signatures in the same account and use them per your relation with your email recipient.
- Use delay while sending email to avoid mistakes found at the last second.
- Calendar – Create a new calendar appointment with all the helpful customization. You can even create multiple calendars and share them with other users.
- Contacts – Create a new contact with all the relevant fields. You can even create multiple address books and share them with other users.
These are the essential features that almost all open-source, free email solutions offer—no more, no less.
The Features that no other community edition offers
But now, I want to mention more features only Carbonio CE offers among all other free solutions. These features solve the collaboration puzzle and make Carbonio CE a complete platform.
- Carbonio Files – It is a full-fledged file server that fulfills your need for:
- Personal storage drive
- Store files and share them by email or a publicly accessible link with relevant permission and expiration period.
Remarks: Do you need to look for or invest in any other file server? I don’t think so.
- Carbonio Docs – With the help of Carbonio Files, Carbonio Docs helps you to create/edit files of all the standard editable formats.
- Multiple users can co-edit the same file at the same time.
- Relevant permissions can be set for internal or external users.
- Users can edit files without even downloading them.
- As editing files will change their content, Carbonio Files keeps track of all the changes by versioning them and allows you to get the older versions.
Remarks: If you are logged in to Carbonio CE webmail, then to edit your doc/file, you do not need to worry about any external office productivity software.
- Carbonio Tasks – Do you need a personal assistant to remind you about your tasks? Let’s Carbonio Tasks take care of this.
- It will remind you on a particular date and time or at every login so you do not miss it.
- You can even set the priority of your tasks so that you can understand the balance between urgent and vital.
- Carbonio Search – The Search feature helps you find your desired item with minimum effort.
Carbonio CE Workstream Collaboration
Workstream Collaboration gives your experience of organizational collaboration a whole new dynamic. Let’s take a look at them.
- Carbonio Chat – Create instant messaging chat with a single user or in a group using Carbonio Chat.
Remarks: You do not need to rely on other external applications for instant messaging among your organization’s users.
- Carbonio Video Call – Do a quick video call with your colleague, team, or a group using the video calling feature of Carbonio CE.
Remarks: Again, you do not need to rely on other external applications for this essential feature.
- Dedicated Mobile App – Carbonio CE provides a dedicated mobile app for Android and IOS users. It helps the user to avail the benefits of the full-fledged collaboration platform of Carbonio CE.
- Dynamic Admin User Interface – CLI (Command Line Interface) is the system admins’ only resort when discussing managing an email collaboration system. Therefore, we thought differently. We launched an Admin User Interface, which helps the system administrator perform almost all the tasks they need to conduct regularly. And as per our world’s comprehensive user feedback, it is evolving with each release.
I do not want to take any more of your time, but it isn’t easy to name all the fascinating features of Carbonio CE in a single article. I tried to describe the features used by most common users. But there is still a lot left on the plate.
Let me mention some of them, and maybe we can discuss them in other dedicated articles.
- GDPR Compliance
- Multi-tenant (Multiple domains on a single instance)
- Multi-Server (For Scalability)
- Improved & Customizable Anti-Virus & AntiSpam Engine.
- Supports both virtual and on-premises environments for the deployment
List view of Carbonio CE Features
Let’s take a quick list based overview of Carbonio CE:
| S/N | User | SysAdmin |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Control, manage, and modify your quarantined emails. | Simple, modern, but lightweight webmail UI |
| 02 | Powerful, all-in-one Admin Panel | Advanced Contacts option featured with multiple calendars, share calendar, and more |
| 03 | Set Forwarding on any user account in both visible and hidden mode. | A convenient way to create/manage accounts and Distribution Lists |
| 04 | A Complete File Server with storage and sharing along with access control. | View/Edit your documents (i.e. doc, xls, ppt, etc.) on the go with an in-built document previewer/editor. |
| 05 | Easy to deploy and automatic renewal of the Let’s Encrypt certificate using the graphical interface. | Manage the mailbox quota per domain basis, per account basis, or even per COS basis. |
| 06 | Task/Activity/Event based personal reminder | A convenient way to create/manage accounts and Distribution Lists |
| 07 | Chat with others in one-to-one or in groups | Re-sync your Global Address List using the Admin Panel. |
| 08 | Re-sync your Global Address List using the Admin Panel. | Control your system the way you want |
| 09 | Set different “Display Name” and “Signatures” in the same account. | All graphical MTA Panel to manage your MTA preferences. |
| 10 | Keep your mailbox tidy with different folders using Incoming/Outgoing filters. | Re-sync your Global Address List using the Admin Pnel. |
| 11 | Use tags to find your desired emails | Enforce a policy for Strong Passwords, Reject Common Passwords, and Failed Login attempts to strengthen security. |
| 12 | Powerful search helps you to find what you are looking for. | Advanced Contacts option featured with multiple calendars, share calendar, and more |
| 13 | Share your entire mailbox or any specific folder with any user. | Block extensions as per your preference to keep users safe from harmful attachments. |
| 14 | Use OOO (Out of office) settings to notify others about your availability status. | Strengthen your server’s custom-built Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam with additional virus signature databases and Antivirus Mirrors to make it almost as efficient as external email security gateways. |
| 15 | Monitor your system with a built-in open-source monitoring tool (Prometheus). | Enforce different checks (i.e., IP, hostname, sender domain, etc.) to block malicious senders. |
| 16 | Dedicated App for Files and Chat to make your experience more convenient. | If you need to use any external relays, set it using the MTA panel. |
| 17 | Supports renowned 3rd-party apps (Outlook, etc.) | A dedicated mobile app (iOS/Android) to keep users free from using unauthorized external Apps. |
| 18 | Show, manage, and flush your mail queues from the MTA panel. | |
| 19 | Show, manage, and flush your mail queues from the MTA panel. |
Finally, despite being a community edition product, it offers more features than any free, open-source, community edition email solution. In some cases, it exceeds some cloud solutions in terms of versatility of features.
So why don’t you give it a spin and let us know how you feel?
Click here to get all the necessary information to download and install Carbonio CE.
Click here to get all migration-related articles.