Table of Contents

Release Date: 23 February 2018

Introduction

Thank you for downloading Scalix 12.7

Scalix 12.7 is the latest upgrade of Scalix 12, providing important fixes and exciting new features. We recommend that you upgrade all systems running Scalix to this latest version.

This document includes late-breaking information about product capabilities, fixed bugs, known issues and workarounds, so please read it thoroughly before beginning your installation or upgrade.

To Download Scalix 12.7 please visit, www.scalix.com/en/solutions

For full documentation on how to install, configure and administer Scalix, see the customer documentation at documentation. In addition, after Installing the Scalix Mail Server and other applications, you can access the following online help systems, which are embedded in the product:

  • Scalix Web Access Online Help

  • Scalix Management Console Online Help

  • Scalix Connect for Microsoft Outlook Online Help

You can also learn more about any of the known issues or report others by going to the Scalix bug tracking system at rm.scalix.com.

Scalix, Inc. is committed to your success with our software. For additional information beyond what is provided here and in the official product documentation, visit the Scalix Forums at Forums.

Customers who have purchased support from Scalix also may also contact Scalix Technical Support to request help, ask questions about how to use a particular feature, provide feedback, or report bugs by visiting Support.

Acknowledgements

Scalix Connect for Outlook includes software developed by the OpenSSL project for use in the OpenSSL toolkit. It also includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and software written by Tim Hudson (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Scalix would like to thank these individuals and the OpenSSL community for their valuable contributions.

Scalix Server includes software based on the Universal Character Set Detector from the Mozilla project written by Simon Montagu (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Shy Shalom (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Shoshannah Forbes and others. Scalix would like to thank these individuals and the Mozilla community for their valuable contributions.

Disclaimer

  • The test appliance should not be used in production for this reasons (would need to reconfigure Scalix with different domain/password) before you can start the download.

  • Scalix Connector requires Admin-rights to install on your Computer

  • System needs to be backed up before upgrade.

Java Environment

Be aware that some middleware components of Scalix require JRE. We support JRE 1.8.x and 1.9.x from vendors: Oracle, IBM, opensource (openjdk in particular)

Please note that :

  • We do not recommend using openjdk on production systems because it can cause slowdowns, higher CPU/Memory usage, instability, and unexpected errors.

  • For IBM platforms, you need to install the IBM JRE package manually.



Scalix Binaries

All the Scalix server binaries are compiled as 32-bit only for the moment.

Scalix can be installed on 64-bit Intel or IBM computers, and in 64-bit Linux environments as a 32-bit application. You will need to make sure that proper 32 bit compatible libraries are installed.



Installation issues

  1. The following procedure/adjustments are mandatory if you installed CentOS6 (64bit) or ORACLE Linux 6 (x86/x64)

    • If port 80 is not set to allow connections (open) in ip tables, Tomcat will not work at all - scalix-tomcat service will run, but in the tomcat log there will be a big backtrace. To allow connections in IP tables:

      • Open port 80 in iptables

      • restart the iptables service

      • restart the scalix-tomcat service

      • restart the httpd service

    • Initialize all web applications in Tomcat (this can take over 20 sec). If you make changes to Tomcat such as the above, please also restart apache (service httpd restart).

  2. Debian installation sometime fails due to a pre-existing error in the sendmail.cf file with the MAILER lines in the wrong place. To fix this manually, move the bad MAILER lines to the end of the file and try again.

  3. On IBM hardware platforms the installer does not install the jre package automatically. You would need to install JRE package manually.

  4. To improve SWA performance you must follow description from official Apache website and make changes accordingly depending on your environment and jre that you are using.

  5. While installing on a non ext4 filesystem, you might be presented with "Error in `omnewul': double free or corruption (top): To avoid this, it is recommended to use the ext4 filesystem



Important end of Life Notices

Upgrading from Scalix 11.3 or earlier is not supported.



Upgrade Notices

Please read the following notes very carefully, as some specific actions might be required as you upgrade from earlier versions of Scalix.

When running Scalix in a mixed-version multi-server setup, where your front end servers are running Scalix Web Access 12.7, the back end servers have to be upgraded to at minimum version 12.7 as well.



Upgrading from a previous version

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Scalix, there are several changes of which you should be aware:

  • Before beginning any upgrades, check your license key>. If you are upgrading to or from a Small Business Edition (SBE), Enterprise Edition (EE) or Hosting Edition (HE) installation, you need to have a valid and current license key with a "Last Valid Issue Date" (LVID) on or after July 1, 2016 (2016-07-01) to use Scalix 12.7. If you continue installation after the respective warning and the license is not valid, your installation will downgrade to the Community Edition. To check the LVID of your license, use the Scalix Management Console or the sxlicense command. To extend your upgrade subscription or to get a new license key, please contact Scalix Sales.

  • When upgrading from a previous installation of Scalix to 12.7, it is recommended that you empty your IMAP caches by running the following command on your backend server (when nobody is signed on to the system and (the rci and IMAP services are off): cd $(omrealpath "~/"); find user* -name imap-cache -exec rm -rf {} \;

  • While moving Scalix to a newer OS version, please follow http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Howtos/Move_Scalix



Features & Supported OS in 12.7

Scalix 12.7 provides the following new features:

Scalix Web application:

  • JRE 1.9 support.

  • Tomcat 8.5 with experimental HTTP2 support (Please see Tomcat documentation how to configure).

  • Log4j2 with live applying changed log level without restarting scalix-tomcat server.

  • Supported PostgreSQL up to 10.x.

Scalix Web Access (SWA) Unleashed:

  • Import calendar (.ics) files into Scalix Calendars.

  • Basic support for attaching files using Drag and Drop.

  • Manage list of devices connected through ActiveSync.

  • Included support for PNG images in the SWA theme engine, providing for more modern customer-defined webmail themes.

  • Updated SWA theme kit.

  • Updated look & feel with new standard built in Scalix-Pilgrim theme.

Scalix Connector for Outlook

  • Fully supported Portuguese Brazil language.

  • Performance improvements on loading Scalix components.

  • Extensively tested with up to latest versions of Microsoft Outlook 2016/365 (32 bit).

  • Updated Openssl v1.1.0g library.

Scalix ActiveSync

Connect ActiveSync enabled wireless devices directly to the Scalix server without additional software needed on the device and use them for push email and wireless calendar and contact synchronization.

  • Support for several accounts per device.

  • Synchronizing Public folders and Other Users folder.

  • Faster and more reliable work for all the latest devices for all existing vendors.

Scalix Active Directory Extensions

  • New attributes for Active Directory schema (user can use ActiveSync or not, etc).



Supported Platforms

Distribution

Version

Architecture

Status

Notes

Red Hat Enterprise Server

>=6.8

i386/x86_64

Fully Supported


Red Hat Enterprise Server

>=6.6

ppc64

Fully Supported

Cyren is not supported

Red Hat Enterprise Server

>=7.2

x86_64

Fully Supported


CentOS,Oracle Linux

>=6.8

i386/x86_64

Fully Supported


CentOS,Oracle Linux

>=7.2

x86_64

Fully Supported


SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

11sp4

i386/x86_64

Fully Supported

Please update your repositories, because some libraries were included by vendor in July 2016

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

12sp1

x86_64

Fully Supported


Debian

>=7.8

i386/x86_64

Experimental Support

Installer can be found at https://github.com/scalix/Debian-installer .
Debian 8 is not supported.

Ubuntu

14.04

i386/x86_64

Experimental Support

Installer can be found at https://github.com/scalix/Debian-installer



NOTES:

Support for Centos7 on IBM platform is presently not available for following reasons:

  • They support Little Endian (LE) only.

  • They have dropped some 32bit packages.

Hardware Support extended for IBM Power and Mainframe

Please refer the Scalix Installation guide for current minimum system requirements.

Alert

Note that the choice of storage environments will have a major influence on performance of your Scalix system. Scalix as an application is largely I/O-bound, using variable, small-blocksize random read/write synchronous file I/O.

Also note that Scalix does not support putting a Scalix Message Store on a NFS- or SMB-based storage device such as a NAS Filer. Performance issues and/or Message Store corruption can occur. This is true for all Linux distributions using Linux 2.6.x kernels as the NFS client software in these kernels have known issues with file locking operations, which Scalix heavily relies on.

We suggest putting the Scalix message store on a Hardware RAID Array, using RAID 1+0 for best performance. The use of RAID 5 or RAID 6 will result in substantially worse performance due to the nature of Scalix Disk I/O patterns (small, synchronous random writes) and is not recommended. In larger installations, we do recommend using iSCSI- or FibreChannel-based SAN storage. We also recommend the use of battery-backed write cache on the RAID controller where available



Packaging

Scalix 12.7 Release consists of a self-extracting shell archives for Linux and a separate ZIP file download for the Windows components.

The Components in the package and their respective version numbers are as follows:

Component

Package

Build

Scalix Installer

Linux .bin

12.7.0.24758

ScalixServer

Linux .bin

12.7.0.15000

Scalix Character Set Detectors

Linux .bin

1.0.20071031-2

Scalix Libical

Linux .bin

0.44.976-2

Scalix iconv Extras

Linux .bin

1.2-7

Scalix Management Services (SAC, RES)

Linux .bin

12.7.0.25750

Scalix Messaging Services ("Platform")

Linux .bin

12.7.0.28778

Scalix Web Access (SWA)

Linux .bin

12.7.0.28816

Scalix Search and Indexing Services (SIS)

Linux .bin

12.7.0.26759

Scalix Text Extractors for Indexing and Search *

Linux .bin

1.0-3

Scalix DB (Postgres)

Linux .bin

12.6.0.15981

Scalix Tomcat Connector

Linux .bin

12.6.0-14721

Scalix Tomcat

Linux .bin

8.5.23-52

Scalix Connect for Outlook**

Windows .zip

12.7.0.9165

Scalix Migration Tool (SMT) ***

Windows .zip

11.4.2.598

Scalix Active Directory Extensions (ADE) ****

Windows .zip

12.7.0.9157



* Text extractors allow the indexing of binary Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and PDF documents. They are only available as part of Scalix Small Business Edition (SBE) or Enterprise Edition (EE)
** For
Scalix Community Edition downloads, Scalix Connect for Outlook (MAPI) is a separate ZIP-file download.
*** The
Scalix Migration Tool is a separately-sold product to migrate eMail, Calendar, Contacts and other objects from Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003 to Scalix. Please contact Scalix Sales for details.
**** The
Scalix Active Directory Extensions are only available as part of Scalix Small Business Edition (SBE) or Enterprise Edition (EE)

Changes/Fixes

Scalix 12.7 addresses a number of issues with the previous versions and comes with more than 100s of bug fixes and various major changes and enhancements added.

For the complete list of Fixes/Changes of Scalix 12.7, please check the Scalix 12.7 changelog file at, Scalix-Changelog-12.7.