*Kerio Mail Server has been renamed Kerio Connect. Many new features have been added since the time this entry was written.

One of the few drawbacks to using a Mac in a business environment has been the lack of a solid, business class groupware email, calendar, and contacts solution.  With the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), Apple has introduced built in support for Exchange, but for small businesses who are concerned about cost of deployment, and maintaining the solution once it has been deployed, Exchange is not always the best choice.  Why should an all Mac office deploy a Windows server just for email?

Two years ago, when I left Apple to become an Apple Consultant, I was introduced to Kerio Mail Server by the new company that I was working for.  I was impressed that my email, contacts, and calendars could easily be synced between my Mac, and any other computer that I wanted to configure with my Kerio account.  In the Summer of 2008, Kerio added full iPhone support which allowed my contacts, and calendars to stay synced with my Mac.  If I ever found myself without access to my Mac, or my iPhone, Kerio Mail Server’s webmail feature had everything that I needed.  All of my contacts, calendars, and email were there.

Although I have worked with a lot of customers who run all Mac offices, most have been a mix and Mac and Windows PCs.  Mac OS X Server provides a really great email solution, but it doesn’t have a true cross platform groupware features.  That’s where Kerio Mail Server comes in.  For small businesses who need cross platform groupware features, Kerio Mail Server (KMS) is a great solution.  Kerio Mail Server runs on Mac OS X Server, Windows Server, and on Linux.  It has full support for Open Directory, and Active Directory, and it allows businesses to run LDAP services on one kind of server (Mac or Windows), and Kerio Mail Server on another server.  One deployment that I worked on involved setting up Mac OS X Server with KMS, but the user accounts were stored in Active Directory on a Windows Server.  This enabled the customer to easily integrate Mac OS X Server into their network without having to make major changes to their existing server/network configuration.

Beta 3 of Kerio Connect 7 (renamed from Kerio Mail Server) from Kerio Technologies, Inc. now supports CardDav.  Snow Leopard users can now rejoice that fully native contacts synching is on the way.

When Snow Leopard released on August 28th, Kerio Mail Server was not fully compatible with Snow Leopard.  I have always enthusiastically upgraded to the latest version of Mac OS X on the date of the release, so when I found out that KMS was not going to support Snow Leopard, that was a major drawback.  Although email was unaffected, Kerio Mail Server was not compatible with the new version of iCal in Snow Leopard.  Anyone who upgraded to Snow Leopard found out afterward that their Kerio hosted calendar was read only in iCal, and could not be managed in iCal.  Users needed to either modify their calendar from webmail, or use another device such as their iPhone.  Kerio followed up with an update (6.7.2) less than a month later.  The update fixed the compatibility issue with iCal.  With Snow Leopard, Apple introduced CardDav into Address Book.  Along with CardDav, Apple also added an updated native Exchange synching feature in Address Book.  This broke the ability for Address Book to synch with Kerio Mail Server through ‘Exchange’ synching.  Snow Leopard users would need to use the Kerio Sync Connector instead, which is a separate add-on that needs to be installed, and later, manually updated each time that there is a Kerio Mail Server update.  Kerio Sync Connector will synchronize the user’s contacts and  calendars with the Kerio server automatically.  Calendar synching can also be handled through CalDav instead of using the Kerio Sync Connector.   Computer geeks like myself don’t have a problem with updating software on a regular basis.  However, non-savvy users will often put off downloading updates, which over time, will lead to synchronization problems.