Slashdot Mirror
Zimbra Collaboration Suite Launched
commonchaos writes "Recently a company named Zimbra has come out of nowhere and released an open source Exchange replacement. The exciting part is a front end that uses AJAX. There is an impressive flash demo, you can download the source or try out a "live" version of the code yourself." Interestingly, this open source system seems to be very similar to the recent Yahoo announcement covered on Slashdot.
Let's say I've got an Exchange server farm running my network's mail system. Everything seems to work okay, but it's about time to stick with what I've got, upgrade to the next Exchange version, or look to another vendor (like Zimbra).
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product? I can see Microsoft's checklist features and see exactly what will be changed between this version of Exchange and the next, but I'm wondering what the benefits will be if I move away from Exchange.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm wondering what criteria you guys use when making the decision to jump ship.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Wow. That's really big. Anyone knows what's in that thing?
I got my own solution to "clean up" Microsoft Exchange junk right here!
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
"but I'm wondering what the benefits will be if I move away from Exchange"
For one thing $$$ in future licensing fees.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I hope the app really works as well as the demo shows.
I briefly looked around Zimbra's site, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like another free-as-in-speech replacement software suite. I don't see the PHB's getting excited about this until they have to pay good money for it.
Mine's stuck on the loading page. Seems about par the course for open-source apps *zing* Thankyou ladies and gentleman, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to bludgeon your waittress to a bloody pulp....
I'm only interested in stuff that matters, so I read Slashdot (when I should be doing work). From what I've seen on Slashdot, it seems that only free software is ever released and never any proprietary stuff. Isn't that great.
I have a feeling that I'm not going to be installing this myself from source, seeing as they boast that they depend on 40+ other open source projects.
:-)
And for anyone who was confused, it's not a drop-in replacement for Exchange servers or clients, it just does what Exchange does, differently. More or less, I guess, not having used it yet
Still, looks like a pretty cool piece of work.
My beef with Zimbra is it requires you to use their own mail server. Yes it has IMAP/POP interfaces for clients to connect to, but you cannot simply point it at your existing mail server. It's really only suitable for small or new sites.
"Hosted Demo is Being Updated
/.ed...
Sorry for the inconvenience, but our Hosted Demo is temporarily being updated."
umm.. replace "Updated" with
How'd they become the "leader in open source collaboration" if they've only just appeared on the scene? And is it really collaboration software, or just another email server?
Personally, I'm not overly impressed with their "impressive flash demo". This story seems like another new company's attempt to drum up hype by submitting their press-release to Slashdot as a news item. The flash demo is neat and all, but I'd be more impressed if their "live" demo was actually working... If it can't handle a simple Slashdotting, it ain't ready for prime-time.
I want to check it out also.. :(
Use coral cache instead!
Flash Demo
Zimbra homepage
Why, oh why can't Slashdot always link to coral cache instead of keep on killing servers?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Personally, I'm looking forward to hula http://hula-project.org/ because it's the sane combination of an enterprise class email platform (netmail) with sensible, link based calendaring and works with pretty much any client. No forced web interface or one program only support. Personally I hope the idea catches on with more people. I can't wait for a point release!
That may be an issue for a small company with only a handful of employees. But for a medium to large-sized company with over a couple hundred employees, the cost of an email system is negligble compared to the cumulative productivity gains of a working email system.
Or to say it another way, money is cheap.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
We might have something to look at. Otherwise there's lots of stuff out there, of course managing it can be a nightmare...
Quack, quack.
Last time I checked, and correct me if I am somehow wrong, SourceForge never claimed to be nor is used by anyone with a tiny bit of intellect as a pulpit for typical bullshit marketroid speak. SourceForge is a site built around the developer - hence yes, it makes perfect sense to go ahead and put implementation details in the description. For the rest of you, I'm sure Zimbra will make a site listing the top-ten reasons needed to make your PHB switch over...
Frequently, it is unnecessarily difficult to implement certain features with certain technologies. I'd be insane to botch together a redundant 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% uptime phone switch in anything other than Erlang - hence Erlang is a perfectly good thing to put in the description, as it is an enabling technology whose use gives it a significant advantage over other products. Capisci? Non e' difficile.
Like this?
The architecture pdf looks good and well thought through. If the goal is to create a rock solid enterprise capable messaging system, then a BSD port and tuning of the file and process permissions are in order. This product installs lots of stuff!! lots of security screeing to do. Great work...I have been waiting for somthing of this calliber for quite a while.
AJAX, buzzwords, blah blah blah. Don't care.
But watch the demo. The first part sucks, I agree. Oooh, it does conversations! Big whoop.
But the end is interesting. It starts with the dates -- that's nicely integrated. Then for some serious, customer integration. Custom actions based on pattern matching is pretty cool. If it's easily scriptable, it could be pretty powerful.
Most of the features can be taken for granted. Yes, the marketoids got to it. But dude, if this has a clean API and doesn't suck on the backend, it might be useful.
Thanks for the response. This is very much in tune with what I was trying to find out. I'm not a sysadmin, and I really don't care what is running beneath the covers, as long as it works. Cost is only one of the benefits of moving away from Microsoft products, and I don't feel it's the most important nor the best selling point of Open Source software. It irks me when people will blurt out zero cost as if that were the only thing that people base their decisions on. Microsoft makes a ton off of Exchange, so a lot of companies see it as the best/easiest/whatever solution for their mail servers. If cost were the issue, they'd all be running sendmail (or whatever OSS backend mail system is in vogue).
So you mention quite a bit of benefit when upgrading the system (lower HW requirements, fewer dependencies on 3rd party support, etc), but what sort of features do I lose when going away from Exchange? Can I still use Outlook to its fullest (calendaring, scheduling, etc) with a non-Microsoft solution? Can I upgrade the backend to Linux without major disruption on the user end? How much extra software installation and configuration is necessary to bring the featureset of the Linux backend up to parity with the Exchange backend?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Hey, I'm a Slasdot reader. I have a mandate to never RTFM ;-). That said, hey, I wasn't too far off - the 10 point PHB-friendly outline is up. Thus I don't know what the guy was complaining about. Don't like the developer nitty-gritty? Don't go to the site. Sheesh.
Open Groupware seems to be a good alternative, these days - especially if you have your own mail server, as they don't supply one!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was quoted in the eWeek article for this launch. We have been testing this for a few weeks now, and like what we see so far. There is no way in Hell I am letting MS Exchange in here.
The really cool part we see in Zimbra is the possibilities to program our own magic phrases, so everytime someone puts in an Order#, SKU, Invoice# or some other keyword, Zimbra will pick up on it, and link it directly into our ERP.
Zimbra shows a lot of promise--
davejenkins.com |
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product?
Well, YMMV, but the last place where I worked that used Exchange had two incidents within a month of each other where some smart ass script-kiddie sent obscene messages to our entire (7+ million) userbase.
Naturally, those of us in California argued for abandoning the Exchange server and just using our existing, working FreeBSD/Sendmail server, but the PHB's back in Singapore decided that the solution was to stick with Exchange, and just cough up about $300K a year to outsource it to a Microsoft Certified Enterprise Partner or some such tripe. They outsourced it, the script kiddies kept owning them whenever they wanted to. It was a farce.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The combination of Outlook/Exchange is one that blocks a lot of sites from replacing Windows with *nix, both on the server and (potentially) the desktop.
./ed), then *in theory* those email+browser+scheduler people will only need a Web browser to do their entire job. A Web browser can run on any platform, so they're now independent of Windows and can migrate to a lower cost platform once Zimbra has been bedded in.
In any moderately sized organization, you'll have a big bunch of people whose only computing requirements will be:
- Web browser (for Internet and/or intranet sites)
- email
- scheduling (i.e. Outlook)
In theory, after the geeks, these should be the easiest people to migrate to a non-Windows desktop. Their requirements are minimal, and the retraining required should also be minimal.
The problem has always been, for these people, in replacing Outlook. Outlook is a key tool for many sites, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been a true drop-in replacement in the FOSS world that has allowed users to ditch Outlook as part of a migration away from Windows. Tools like Evolution are great, but they mandate a switch to Gnome, and that means moving away from Windows at the same time in a big-bang approach. Lots of cost-sensitive IT shops want to migrate away from Windows, but aren't prepared to take the risk of that big-bang changeover - they'd rather put in an alternative to Outlook, bed it in, then at some later date move off Windows once they're sure all their requirements are covered.
If Zimbra has a decent Web-based client (can't tell - site is
It may not have the fancy Javascripted front-end but it is certainly loaded with useful features for groups of people working together.
Contacts, Calendar, Email, File repository using WebDav (Files are version controlled) and more.
Hello, ... i mean, it's nothing new, just another way to look @ JS
We use @Mail as a 'replacement' for Exchange - It's commercial but is built on open-source, including Exim / Courier-IMAP / Perl / MySQL - Take a loot at: http://atmail.com/
IMHO, @Mail has undergone many more revisions, has commercial support, and have a better WebMail interface then Zimbra.
But on the flip side, great to see some competition to Exchange!
BTW - Why is Ajax the next 'DHTML' hype
For FC3:F C3.tgz.torrent
http://downloads.zimbra.com/3.0_M1/zcs-3.0.M1_21.
Unfortunately I don't see this taking off. I installed Zimbra and tried it out myself and it is just too slow. The interface looks really good for a web application, but it is dog slow and very unresponsive to user actions. I can't imagine anyone using the web interface as the primary way of using Zimbra. If Zimbra ever takes off, it is going to need smooth Outlook/Entourage/Evolution integration.
Furthermore, I think this is a good as web applications are going to get. Lets face it people, HTML and web browsers are just not made to run desktop style applications. AJAX is really cool, but the simple fact is that HTML lacks the most basic tools to build a good GUI. The document model just doesn't work for sophisticated applications.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I can give you the reasons why I moved away from Exchange. Others may have different reasons, and others may have good reasons to stay with Exchange. Anyway, this is my own example.
.forward files when needed, and looking for a good web interface so they can do it themselves. The Webmin interface I tried didn't work well, so I'm still looking, and may have to work on the Webmin module myself.
In a small (but growing) business of a dozen employees, an old NT server SBS edition with Exchange 5.5 needed to be replaced. I decided to go with a Linux server.
On the Exchange side, what I didn't like was:
1. all email is in a proprietary database, in a single (huge!) file. If something goes wrong with that file (as it once did), it's a nightmare to bring it back up, if it works at all. If you can't repair it, you loose anything that came in after the last backup.
2. speaking of backups, Exchange needs special Exchange-aware backup programs. You cannot just copy the files.
3. Lack of flexibility in handling of incoming mail, spam filtering, forwarding, etc.
4. No ssh access for quick and easy remote administration.
5. No simple text-file based configuration, meaning no grep or such to find some setting. You have to move around all the menus if you cannot remember where a setting was.
6. It is hard to move away from proprietary solutions like Exchange because you cannot just copy files and hand them over to another application. That's a good reason to do it rather sooner than later when it may become harder yet. It was not easy to move mailboxes from Exchange to IMAP.
So in the new setup, I used Postfix and Courier IMAP:
1. very easy and very flexible and powerful configuration
2. all configuration through simple text files which can be grep-ed, compared, backed-up, whatever.
3. simple backups through plain file copies or rsync
4. every mail is in it's own plain text file. Can be grep-ed, and if a file goes corrupt (didn't happen yet), it is only that single email.
5. easy administration. For example, I didn't implement quotas, but I'm considering setting up a little script that would check for the size of the maildirs and of single huge files, and send a little email to the users. Like "you are using up 1 GB for emails; please consider removing unnecessary stuff" or "Would you please check if you still need the 50 10 MB files in you mailbox". I can easily add a summary of the huge mails so the user knows which ones they are.
5. easy migration. If I ever decide I would like to replace Postfix or Courier with some other program, it's no problem. I'm not locked in the current programs. Not that I would want to move to other programs. I'm very happy with this setup. But I like to be sure I can if I ever wish to.
This has been running reliably for 6 months now, and I'm a very happy mail admin.
The users have only one complaint: they cannot set up an Out of Office auto-responder like they could on Exchange. I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success. They want it anyway. So I'm setting up vacation in their
To comment on the article: wouldn't it be great if /. had a regex filter so that we can get rid of these "exchange replacment" articles....
Just today I saw KDE goes wild on an SLES9SP2 system and nearly freeze it - the same fucking thing that used to happen back in 2000. Five years past by and not much has changed.
> That said if you need a "farm" of computers to run your mail and your company has fewer than 100,000 employees, I think the benefit of moving off Exchange should be obvious: you wouldn't need the farm any more.
You need directory services, scheduling, global address book, forms and sophisticated IMAP folder sharing even in a very small company (100 employees), so even in small-and-medium enterprises, people do need Exchange-like functionality and not only SMTP/IMAP/Webmail.
Dovecot: it's in alpha, for Christ's sake (http://www.dovecot.org/)
>If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
1. Software for managing AD: not really that expensive. On Linux you need to spend as much to write and maintain custom scripts, Webforms and what not.
2. Backup software: yes, because Exchange has its internal database format (i.e. it does not use only flat files). You can't back that up without suspending I/O to a consistent state which means you have to have an application-side plugin.
3. LVM: can't create crash-consistent snapshots of database files so what you say is incorrect, unless you meant snapshots of ordinary IMAP directories (incorrect comparison - database format vs. flat files). Besides, if you have VSS H/W Provider agent on Exchange server, you can take snapshots (on storage or the server itself), re-mount them and backup them using the regular Windows software.
So an OSS solution for this type of software doesn't have the familiar advantage of cost due to it being free (as in beer). But this doesn't mean that this mail server software doesn't have a significantly smaller TCO. And the AJAX interface is a nice touch. But things like how well the software can handle disk failures, how easy it is to do backups, how easy it is to handle 1 million mailboxes, etc. are the factors that make mail server software succeed or fail.
Note: Exchange doesn't do any of these things well.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
What mail client were your users using before the switch? After? Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore? Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
I see the benefit in having separate mail databases (to the point where you have separate plaintext files for each mail!) over having a huge central database that runs the risk of getting corrupted. What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Thanks for the response, it was very englightening.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
You have got to be kidding me! Sendmail/Dovecot doesn't even approach the functionality of Exchange. Not even close. Dont' get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to not run Exchange, but lack of features is not one of them. There is a reason why Exchange uses so much resources. Microsoft programmers are not THAT incompetent. The bloat comes from feature creep, not so much bad programming. The question is, are you using all the features of Exchange? If not, one might consider something simpler like sendmail/IMP, but a lot of people like the group calendaring and all that.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
It's about choice and the platform you run. If you 'have' to implement an exchange server - you're no longer forced to use a bluescreen-able platform.
Choice is good.
What mail client were your users using before the switch?
Outlook 2000
After?
Outlook 2003, alas!
The upgrade from Office 97 with Outlook 2000 to Office/Outlook 2003 was not easy. So during a few days, they used Thunderbird for email. Easy to set up, always works, leaves mails on the server (the way I set it up), no hassles.
But most users wanted Outlook. Only 2 still use Thunderbird. Probably my fault: I didn't do any training for Thunderbird. So I suspect that apart from the mushy Fisher-Price TB icons, their problem with TB was mainly that they thought they couldn't do some things because they didn't look in the menus. Nobody was able to give me rational reasons why they preferred Outlook. Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore?
There is no shared calendar, but nobody was using that anyway. If they do want that some day, I don't know what I could use for that and it may be a problem.
There is no central Exchange address book, but that was not needed. They have their own database with all the business contacts, including emails. If needed later, I can set up an LDAP solution or whatever.
Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
- Free and excellent antivirus (ClamAV)
- Free and excellent spam filtering (a couple of RBLs, header checks in Postfix, and Spamassassin to mark the remaining spam as such)
- Remote administration through SSH. That is not only an admin benefit, but also a user benefit. With Exchange, if they had a problem/question/requirement, they had to wait for me to come by. Now, I can act immediately over SSH. (Of course, you can setup VNC to manage a GUI, but it is slow and clunky). There are also answers I can give them straight away by looking at the logs (X says he didn't get my email / Yes he did; mail.x.com accepted the mail at 12h32; he should ask his own mail admin. I didn't get the email from Y / True, it was rejected because it was 20 MB. etc.)
What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Nothing special. There is no particular need. There are no "prying eyes" inside the network, and they do regularly have their mail read by someone else to whom they give their password (it's not a bug, it's a feature).
There is no WiFi on the network. I try to explain to them they should use better passwords anyway, but most don't care.
As an admin, I can of course read everything if I want. But I don't want to, and more importantly, they have to fully trust their network admin. If they don't, they need to find another admin quickly anyway. In this regard, network admins are like bookkeepers and doctors. You cannot have one whom you don't trust.
If you like XUL, checkout @mail - http://atmail.com/ - A native 'Outlook' killer via the Web - XUL/Mozilla based, with another interface for IE/other-clients.
Neat IMHO!
Nobody was able to give me rational reasons why they preferred Outlook.
Don't underestimate the power of the common. They're used to it, they have friends and colleagues that use it, it's become a bit like Xerox-ing something. Or Google-ing. Maybe less so, but since everyone's using it, your users want it as well. They don't want to be "stuck" with another (inferior? They don't know!) product. (Yes yes, I know it's great, have been using it for over a year and am never switching back to Outlook.)
Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Oh, if only admins could all be like that!
I see... For a moment, I was wondering if it had anything to do with this other wonderful flash demo (leaves me speechless everytime)...
Zimbra, Zombo...
If Squirrelmail (WebMail) fits into your config then there is an 'out-of-office' module that can be installed to allow users to manage the vacation functionality for themselves.
AT&ROFLMAO
Exchange is one of those things that will very soon be made moot by the changing tides of technology. First of all the vast majority of businesses are tiny with less then 20 employees. It makes no sense to install and maintain a whole server just for email. In bigger organization you have a highly mobile and dispersed workforce living off their cell phones.
.Mac service by apple. You get shared file storage, email, shared calenders, groups, syncronizing with your desktop, ical files you can take with you on your laptop (or ipod) etc all without having to install and maintain a server or even needing an office and for less then $100.00 per employee per year.
Take a look at something like
I know that sounds like a commercial but look at it, you get almost all the functionality of exchange for a fraction of the cost and none of the headache. Pretty soon Yahoo (which already has most of that functionality) or google will do it too. Along with the big boys there will be hundreds of smaller companies who can provide the same things by gluing together open source components.
My advice is to try to avoid an email (or collaboration) server in the first place. You don't need the headache and it's cheap to outsource.
evil is as evil does
What the he... oooohh mesmerizing.
But I find it appropriate that this article is immediately above "Why Students Are Leaving Engineering"
I used to work with the founder of Zimbra at another company, and his constant and relentless political moves to further his career at the expense of others was really tiring... and made a lot of good engineers bitter and tired.
Yeah it's dog-eat-dog world, you have to look out for yourself, blah-blah-blah, whatever... but the long hours of engineering don't make me want to leave, it's guys like that.
With that said, the product looks okay, best of luck to them.
Oracle used to offer their collaboration server as a hosted service. I think it was a pretty good idea, looks like they aren't doing it anymore. Too bad, it's pretty cool.
evil is as evil does
Hotmail will be an AJAX based app when Microsoft releases Kahuna
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product?
I attended a Novell conference last year, where there was a talk on GroupWise 3rd party extensions. The speaker had an interesting survey for the audience (which consisted of mostly GroupWise admins, but also Exchange admins).
The question was how many email users were located at each site, and how many post office admins supported these users. That turned out a rather interesting ratio in favor of GroupWise, though, only a couple of samples were taken as the speaker interviewed the audience. I can't remember exactly, but I think it was something along the lines of one Groupwise admin per 500 email users, compared to only 100 email users for each Exchange admin.
Maybe you could ask around and compare yourself if you're considering moving to a new product. I know it's probably a bogus metric, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
It's called contact from Samsung.
It is a complete enterprise grade exchange server replacement that is excellent. It beats all comers as near as I can tell.
All features and functions, fully compatible, very mature.
http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/
It takes a little bit of effort to get setup initially, but yes it is possible.
Public Folder functionality can be replaced with this:
Open Exchange Outlook Client
Outlook will publish a summary of it's free busy data to the internet as opposed to publishing it to an exchange public folder:
Outlook free / busy information for Outlook 2003
Overall if you do it right, the chances are actually that you will not only end up with a more robust system than what Exchange is. Especially if you buy it soon, you have the ability to go 64bit on your servers before Microsoft do! This means that you can run one server instead of 4 or 4000 (Depending really on the size of the organisation that you look after)
This interface looks like it will join onto anything. If you like it, it might even join onto OpenExchange.
Berny
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
... which IMO is excellent, Open Source, has an optional Web Interface and is Java based for relatively easy customizing. See their site.
Features of OX that I dont see in Zimbra:
And there are connectors for Exchange, Lotus Notes, Evolution, etc.
If the app works at least half as good as the demo shows, this will be a killer.
Something sounds almost too good to be true here- it seems incredible someone developed such an app and then realeased it as open-source. It even has MAPI outlook integration...
I'll see the demo after the slashdotting is over, and then i'll probably try to deploy it on my own box, and then if it works i'm deploying it for the company I work for as soon as I have time.
And it's even made with the java! This is a big plus for me because my company develops web apps with java- we can extend it as much as we wish. And probably it has real nice and extensible application design/architecture, unlike lots of PHP apps I've seen... And it looks like it is based on the wonderful apache java libraries, that means little reinventing the wheel too.
One small thing i didn't like about it is that they use MySQL for DB, but I figure that is not a big issue, and probably can be fixed easily (switched over to Postgres).
--Coder
The features are neat and seem do good at dealing with the "E-Mail ist everything" Groupware approach. Which I don't like to much but that would just be me.
Expect the client to do a little slowpocking and eat reasources - but that's a fair trade for a free Groupware that pushes some limits.
I'd actually go by and build an entire Groupware like the Basecamp service in Flash/AS - but again that's just me.
Kudos to them or going through the fuss with JavaScript.
Now Imagine e-groupware, opengroupware, more-groupware, knowledgetree, zimbra and a few other getting together and building ONE GW suite. That would kick the ass out of MS Exchange, no?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I suspect you are right.
Until recently I worked for a small local company with < 50 staff. We used Qmail, and Exim for mail handling.
Then we got bought by another company. The new owners immediately ripped out our mail server (working wonderfully for years) and installed a whole new set of Windows based infrastructure to match their "Corporate standards".
Now we have Lotus Notes running away in a corner. Sure it's pretty nice in some respects, but a lot of staff hated the change from their mail client (mostly Eudora) to Notes. It didn't seem like money was an object though. Brand new Dell machines were provided and dropped in to host the Domino server.
Previously simple jobs like restarting the mailserver, scanning for viruses, now take much longer and require additional ongoing expenses. Still at least we match the Corporate Standard Platform ... *sigh*
I'd rather have Exchange (5.0) than Notes personally ..
Syncing PocketPCs (ipaq 4150 is a cool device) with anything but Outlook (Mac notwithstanding) sucks the big one. Id like to move from Outlook and am working on using my phone (nokia 6630) as my PDA but it takes time. Besides, Outlook 2003 is really not that bad of an app - nice even.
Knowledge is valuable. Ignorance is dangerous. Censorship is unacceptable. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
Don't forget Exchange's extremely poor ability to handle multiple incoming mail messages from outside its domain, its extremely poor or non-existent virus checking, the roughly 24 hours per machine to install a new one and get it up and running unless you have maintained disk image, needing to reboot it at least once a month for the latest security updates, and its complete lack of MacOS or Linux clients that speak its calendar formats.
That leaves out the more technically detailed problems, like its poor support of IMAP and SMTPAUTH and insistence on running a bunch of security vulnerable services and being almost impossible to turn those vulnerable services off without sacrificing your liver to an Elder God of Windows Clue.
If you have to support Exchange-like groupware or in particular, their fairly good calendar functionality for your Outlook insistent users, take a look at Novell's calendar server with Outlook plug-ins and good tools for both Linux and MacOS as well.
Citadel has been around for years (isn't/wasn't vapour) and is trivial to setup, and supports basically every mail protocol in use (add NNTP to the list once I'm finished developing the code for it) and a full GroupDAV implementation (last time I checked no one else has that yet).
Citadel is driven more towards online communities than small workgroups though, but it works. Apart from maintaining a patch to use bogofilter instead of spamassassin, I rarely touch the install now.
Disclaimer: Very happy Citadel user. And amateur code hacker.
Actually, one advantage of Exchange that I'm not sure features in any of the other offerings, is its ability to store one copy of an attachment that has been sent to many recipients.
Is anyone working on something like this?
- Brian
There are definitely business models out there that can work. The key is to be able to add value to the product in a way that the PHB can understand.
SourceFire seems to have found a way to do it. Going beyond just packaging Snort on "black boxes" and providing support, they went through the effort to get their commercial version of Snort through the necessary certifications to be allowed on US government networks. It cost them money, but it is going to make them money as well.
My PHB wouldn't have allowed me to deploy Snort, arguably with good reason. But SourceFire, no problem. And from what I hear at other agencies, I'm not the only one.
It works because Snort has established a solid reputation, and SourceFire has added the pieces it takes to sell it to the boss.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Ga- Ji, Berrrri Bim- Ba- Klandiri....!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I take that comment with a grain of salt. I work for a company with over 3000 employees. We are very successful, having been in business for over 50 years and made a profit every single year.
Our email solution? Sendmail. Primitive maybe, but it works for us. I would be tough to convince that spending tens or probably hundreds of thousands of dollars for Exchange is going to be a good investment. (And yes I have administered and used Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, GroupWise, etc)
I know people who spend so much time "managing" their email, calendars, and the like, they never get anything accomplished.
Guess what? Most of your email is crap. Delete it and get some work done.
One of my responsibilities is GroupWise administration (others include managing a Citrix farm, supporting Blackberry and Treo handhelds, managing accounts in our eDirectory tree, etc). I and a colleague manage about 3200 GroupWise users in our region - part time.
Self awareness - try it!
I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success.
Perhaps because they're not 'useless' or 'evil' but actually 'useful' in some situations, like in business environments when people need to let other people know they're away and who to contact in the meantime?
I don't know your whole situation, but this is the sort of anecdote which gives the open source push a bad name. Yes, it has good names too, and lots of positive press, but these sorts of stories scare people away from trying OS too.
Business has fully functional setup.
Someone replaces it with something less powerful from the end user's perspective.
Replacer tries to explain why getting rid of functionality people relied on is 'better'.
???
There's usually a 'proft!' at the end somewhere, but I'm not sure where it would fit in in this case.
creation science book
Why I moved off of Exchanve Server -- I wanted my data in open formats and out of the "black box" that Exchange Server is. We moved to Exchange4Linux, which stores everything (and I mean everything) in a PostgreSQL database (18G and growing). SMTP is whatever you want, but Postfix is what they recommend. I've tried practically every Exchange replacement out there (SLES/SLOX, OpenExchange, a plethora of web-based crap, Bynari, Steltor (now Oracle's) CorporateTime, Hitachi's solution, etc., etc.) and this one is the (clear) winner in my eyes. The entire thing is written in Python, including the Outlook connector, and everything but the connector is open-source. (Outlook connectors are EUR$50/seat with discounts for volume). We still run Outlook on the desktops since that is the user interface and many here still want it, but as far as the backend is concerned, I couldn't be happier now. There is something just plain cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries over all of the company's emails, contacts, todos, journals, you name it... We have it tying in to our Asterisk PBX as well so, for example, the service guy who's on call gets the emergency page. The service department just maintains their Pager Calendar and I do a lookup to see who's on duty.
E4L isn't without its warts (the IMAP server is still in early development, no POP or LDAP yet), but being Open Source and also being in active development, these get polished or cut out (as necessary) in time. And I can add/change the system and get my changes contributed back. I don't have to worry about where my data went to or if the system ever crashes how to recover the data. If some weird-ass situation comes up and I need to correlate my data in some unforseen way... well now I can, and I don't need some kind of screwed-up and possibly commercial API to get it done. And most importantly for me, I don't have to worry about the system changing or being eliminated due to some other company's paradigm shift.
"it's about time to stick with what I've got, upgrade to the next Exchange version, or look to another vendor"
It's about time you did one of the only three things you could possibly do? Decisions decisions.
I thought it was about time I replied to this comment or didn't reply to this comment.
I prefer Open-Xchange to the MS product. The OX architecture runs Java servlets against a Postgres RDBMS. Adding features is a matter of installing new servlets. Dropping unnecessary features is a matter of tinkering with the open source. It integrates with my existing "Contacts" servers with LDAP, my existing SMTP/IMAP/POP servers, Apache. I integrated my own services by running other servers, like my streaming server, against the LDAPd for authentication and Postgres for metadata. Every service is scalable, in clusters, even geographically.
Oh, and MS Exchange sucks. Especially its data stores, with its impenetrable schema and flatfile legacy. OX doesn't suck like that, and I (or someone I hire, or someone checking their changes into CVS) can fix anything I don't like. OX doesn't lock me into any other specific SW: every component (server or client) has alternatives. Get rid of MS Exchange, and get behind the OX.
--
make install -not war
In my opinion, reliability is the most important part, then of course cost, and to keep the same kind of functionality.
Every week, it seems like you hear about some "exchange server replacement". Every time they fall short. Wake me up- when I can configure all the darned Outlook clients and it behaves 99% EXACTLY like exchange. Until it does that, it is not a replacement. All this does, is pin false hopes. It is NOT an exchange replacement, it is nice webmail. Great, a good webmail client is awesome, glad to see it. Next...
no god is good
Idots2 is a replacement interface for Egroupware that is a whole desktop / multitasking environment in JavaScript. It's pure candy. A little slow on our old server, but beautiful nonetheless. Try the demo.
If you like the idea of an open source collaboration suite, you might also want to check out Citadel, which has been around for quite some time and offers many of the same features. It's very easy to install (doesn't require any manual mucking about with database servers etc.) and has mail, calendaring, address books, bulletin boards, real-time chat, instant messaging, IMAP/POP/SMTP, GroupDAV, and an attractive web front end with an increasing amount of AJAX functionality.
As I said yesterday in another comment, there won't be just one open source replacement for Exchange. Everyone will end up selecting the one whose features fit their organization best, rather than Microsoft's "one size fits all, and you have to use Exchange if you want to use Outlook" approach.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Do you REALLY believe that Microsoft has managed to properly secure Outlook 2003?
Given "sendmail and dovecot" only prove 1/10th - 1/100th the functionality of Exchange, I'd say that's a fair trade.
People on Slashdot seem to love saying "Exchange? We can just replace that with {sendmail|postfix|qmail|$MTA} and {dovecot|squirrelmail|courier-imap|$IMAP_SERVER}". I can only assume these people have never actually *used* Exchange, or have never dealt with people who actually use Exchange. Exchange does a hell of a lot more than just bouncing a few emails back and forth.
How do you uninstall this thing? I installed it and the load on the server became unbearable. There are no instructions on how to get rid of this thing!
Does it replace port 25 with its own daemon? I need to revert everything back.
eTrade SUCKS
Welcome to Zombo com you can do anythign with AJAX/Zombo.com
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
The trouble is, web-based calendaring and email clients all suck (or, at least, every one I've ever tried did). Sure, you could replace the Exchange+Outlook[+AD] combo with some web-based setup, but you probably won't get much support form the people who actually use it intensively (ie: management).
It's great that you were able to replace Exchange with Postfix and Courier, but the simple fact is if your userbase had actually been using the fancy features that make Exchange useful, you wouldn't have been able to.
The users have only one complaint: they cannot set up an Out of Office auto-responder like they could on Exchange. I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success. They want it anyway. So I'm setting up vacation in their .forward files when needed, and looking for a good web interface so they can do it themselves. The Webmin interface I tried didn't work well, so I'm still looking, and may have to work on the Webmin module myself.
Try creating a special "Out Of Office" (or similar) folder in their $MAILDIR, have them save an out-of-office message in that, then use procmail to check if it exists and send it whenever a mail arrives for that user. Depending on your existing setup, it might be easier. More importantly, it's easier for end users to managed without moving outside of outlook.
One of the biggest reasons that I can see for using Sendmail as your MTA and a *nix based system is programming using procmail. Yes Exchange does have the Exchange event system, but it's no where near as simple to program as using procmail.
I had a customer previously that we changed their business over to Linux, we gave them an "Exchange replacement" admittedly it wasn't as feature rich, but in a business of less than 100 employees, they weren't using a lot of the functionality anyway.
What they were getting though was a lot of orders that had to be processed manually. These orders were coming in via email in a standard format. We got the emails PGP / GPG signed before they left (That was a pain in the arse to do, but as soon as we told them what we were doing they all of a sudden pulled their finger out and played ball) pulled apart the messages and lodged all the orders automatically into their database. Immediately that kicked off a trigger, and the database went through and processed all the information we dropped in. This meant that not only did we free up resources in finance to get payments done quicker (Mine included!) it meant that their customers were recieving goods a day or so faster.
Now this would have been possible to do under Exchange, but it would have taken a lot longer to program and the system itself doesn't really lend itself to this type of work so easily.
Now if you are front ending Exchange with Sendmail, yes this is still possible, but at the same time it's not as clean a solution as running everything under *nix. We did this setup a couple of years ago, we gave the customer the documentation and another contractor has re-implemented the same solution for them on newer hardware. They are still running it to this day. Now, if they grow any more and NEED Exchange they can still do that, but at the same time, from the owners there who I still know, they think it's still the best thing for their business and it's given them an edge over their competition that the others still haven't picked up on yet.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
My life is finally completed. This is the last piece of software I have been waiting for from the open source world. I just ordered parts to build my next generation server for my home. An AMD 3200+ Venice core and a ASROCK socket 939 board only cost $210 at ewiz.com. With the FSP 300W fanless power (>80% efficiency), 1GB Unbuffered ECC ram and a bunch of harddrives. I'm building a powerful, reliable and quiet server that runs 24X7 with power consumption of a light bulb (~60W idle). Now with the new exchange replacement + outlook connector + samba, I'm able to seamlessly integrate all Windows/Linux/OQO/PDA I have at home with that server at possibly 0 software cost. Hail to the 21th century.
One possible advantage would be the feasibility of doing mailbox (brick-level) restores. Exchange has no native support for this, so if some PHB want's an email from last year restored, you get to build a brand new server, install Exchange on it and do a complete restore of the entire database. I know because my mail guy is doing it as we speak :(
I don't know about Zimbra, but I'm be surprised if it was as poorly designed.
A few users are instructed in editing their H:\vacation.msg file in a text editor and renaming their "H:\.forward.not" file to "H:\.forward". For others (who are scared by a text editor and not sure how to rename a file), I do it myself over SSH. I'm not using procmail, but this is equivalent.
.forward and vacation.msg files.
Still, a nice web interface would be nice, which would take care of ensuring the sanity of the
For free software, you have OpenGroupware, Horde, and the just mentioned Zimbra. They will all provide the functionality that Exchange does. I'm sure there are others, too.
For commercial alternative designs, you have Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes. There are others, but I am familiar with those.
For commercial Exchange compatible, you have OpenXchange and openmail. Again, there are very likely others.
I can't think of any free software Exchange compatible server platforms. Personally, my research was targetted at being able to do email, group calendars, and contact lists. I wanted to do so without touching Outlook, and without requiring Windows Server.
All of the platforms that I've mentioned are less expensive in licensing than Exchange/Outlook are. Some of them require more expertise to set up well, like Notes, and all of them will run without Windows. I can't vouch from experience for the reliability of the open source software, but all of the commercial software is *very* reliable.
Perhaps other people can fill in even more info?
I saw this when looking at another slashdot article. I thought it looked nice, and I liked the way it handled conversations. But it was missing a very important feature that ABSOLUTELY have to have. In Exchange it is called Public Folder. The basic function is that I create a mailbox that multiple people have access to. It is nice if it is simply a folder rather than a different mailbox. Usually one person is responsible for the contents of that folder. When that person goes on vacation, I don't have to re-assign their email address to someone else. Nor do I have to give someone else permission to access all of the first person's email account. The second person simply checks the group folder and takes action if needed.
Having the group folder is also helpful if more than one person is assigned to answer emails sent to one address, such as support@(domain). Although there is a small risk of two people working on the same email, there are many different work-arounds to prevent duplication of effort. If I had 10, 20 or 40 people working out of the same folder, I would invest in a CRM that could handle assigning emails, but with only 2 or three dealing with one folder, it is cheaper and simpler to manage them manually.
I have been burned before when an admin uses his personal company email to register a product or list that address as a contact address, only to have the admin leave and not be able to catch and update everywhere his address was used. Then, when an important notice is sent, no one catches it and takes the appropriate action needed at that time. I have long been an advocate of using public or group folders for important emails so that if an admin is no longer employed or simply on vacation, these vital emails do not get missed.
Sadly, the Zimbra software is still missing this group email feature. Until it is there, Zimbra isn't worth a closer inspection to see if it is a viable option.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Zimbra doesn't really push the envelope at first glance, but I was impressed by the conversation controls and the tags.
For me tags are incredibly useful and I am often annoyed at Outlook's search tools and how I handle getting to the mail I really need. So for me, Zimbra doesn't innovate as much as it provides a few interesting gadgets.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
The product and suite and the company clearly look like they both were designed to be "flipped", i.e. bought out by a big player. AJAX-based interfaced for Web mail is the big things now, and both Yahoo, Hotmail and Google are racing to deploy them.
I would really be surprised if the company expected to have a snowball's chance in hell to really compete against Exchange. Just like Outpost (which was bought out by Yahoo), I believe this product will be bought out by a larger player and get integrated into some other product line. I suspect this trend accelerated with that Business 2.0 magazine article about designing companies to be flipped.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
how out of nowhere can you be when you show up to LinuxWorld to display your product?
OpenMail is no more. It was licensed to Scalix some time back. Scalix has taken it, given it a rather nice AJAX web client as well as other good things, and is giving it away (see the "Community Edition" on their site).
I'm not to keen on setting up an email server in house (I am the IT department, among other things), so we will likely use a webhost who offers us IMAP mail accounts in our webspace. Currently we have no shared calendar system, and I've been charged with implementing one. The budget is small, so Exchange, etc are out of reach. Aside from that, we don't need a ton of features, just a way to view individual shared calendars, departmental/team calendars (which have multiple readers, one writer), and also allow users to create project calendar's (again with multiple readers and one writer). A system to send and accept meeting invitations is also high on the list. Lastly, being able to view a group of calendars overlayed on one another would be ideal (so you could view departmental calendar and the individual shared calendars of everyone in that department on one calendar.
The client end has to run on Windows, the server can be Windows or Linux. OSS is ideal, for it's free as in beer aspects. I'd like to have email and calendar software in one package, but really they just need to be able to integrate (so I can send you a meeting invite, you get a notice of it, decline or accept it, and the calendar is updated to reflect all of this).
I've looked through all the packages link in this thread, and another semi recent Slashdot story; so Zimbra, OpenGroupware, Citadel, eGroupware, and a few others have all been looked at. They all look like nice software, but I'm not sure which ones I should devote my time to really evaluating. A webbased calendar is completely doable (maybe even nice to not have to deploy any new software to the desktops) but the UI has to be intuitive and effective. (eGroupware's web UI, for example, seemed overly complex for what it had to do).
Hey, since you're here ...
I see Zimbra uses Mysql on the backend and a tomcat frontend. What sort of provision is there in your code for load balancing? Can you use Tomcat's loadbalancing/session awareness, possibly with a hardware load balancer? Can you replicate the mysql database?
It'd be really cool if you could have all the Zimbra app servers pointing to a mysql cluster running on other machines, but it doesn't appear as though this setup is supported.
-EvilMagnus
imagine.
its an open source product.
its missing a feature
maybe you'd just like it to do something different
why, you can just whip out the old development tools and add the missing feature. you can make it do things differently.
*YOU* can have it *YOUR WAY*
*YOU* HAVE THE POWER, use it wisely.
YOU do not have to just blindly accept what someone offers. YOU can make your tools work around YOU.
What an amazing concept.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Samsung Contact was formerly known as HP OpenMail. I don't know who's to blame for its failure but it was just another great thing that HP had ( or made ) that they just couldn't promote well.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Well, it depends on who's perspective you're looking from. From a managerial perspective, 20 servers running mail is much better than 1, because it's more money they get to push around, and it results in more power and influence. Thus, the "manager" type will see exchange as being better, no matter what, because this is somewhere that a Linux solution will never compete.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
We actually planned to upgrade our hosted demo last night. Just after we took the demo offline the story hit. We stayed up all night trying to figure out why things were so slow; when the CPU on the web servers were 90%+ idle. Turned out to be that the firewall at our ISP was only 10Mbit so it effectively throttled our site. This has been resolved, so we'll put the demo back up soon. You can see the bandwidth usage here: http://downloads.zimbra.com/slashdot_firewall_cap. png/
Yeah - much better than ms-xchng crap. Unfortunately, HP was quite tied to ms re: their PC's and they didn't want to piss them off. So, they didn't promote it. Finally, they sold it off to samsung who doesn't appear to have done a good job of promoting it themselves.
C'est la Vie
We've put the demo back up now that the bulk of the slashdotting is over... http://www.zimbra.com/demo/
The original product was designed to work in a NetBIOS LAN-only file-server environment, with a proprietary dialup interface hacked on later, and SMTP client support grudgingly and unreliably added even later. Back in 1994, it was the third-worst mail system I'd ever used, and I'd been online over a decade using and managing a wide variety of mail systems. Many BandAids, kilometers of duct tape, and spools of baling wire later, it's had some LDAP-like stuff added underneath, and it's possible to use on a laptop that's sometimes attached to your work LAN, sometimes disconnected, sometimes on random wireless or wired internet or private-net connections, and it usually doesn't get hosed up on me more than once a week, refusing to let me queue email or refusing to transmit the queued stuff or access my calendar or whatever, but it's really still made for people whose computers are tethered to their desktops 7x24x365 and have a big air-conditioned server farm for Exchange to live on. And don't even get me started about what helpful header-munging does to spam-filtering, or why I can't run my own black/white/keyword/filter lists without getting disconnected from the corporate filters our IT droids run.
The calendar's integration into Exchange's proprietary protocols is a major reason for its success and continued purchases of upgrades - but a Calendar program could just as easily have been built around HTTP/CGI, which would allow most email clients that support clicking on URLs to access it, and allow a much wider variety of client programs and clientless browser interfaces, so you wouldn't have to go to the overhead of firing up Outlook just to check your calendar - a major issue in a laptop environment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If I didn't know any better, I'd say you sound like a regular jackass. (Obligatory Jerky Boys reference)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I've been pouring over the site for a while now. Very very interesting stuff, this Zimbra...
If you actually look at the details, it's a Linux based (Red Hat RPM distro at the moment) that appears to be the absolute best web email system I've seen to date. AJAX is only a very small part of what Zimbra does. AJAX simply improves the end user browser experience by making it feel more like a local application and less like a web app. AJAX allows for page updates without reloading the whole page so it can add features like drag and drop, right-clicking context menus, live searches, etc. i.e. faster instant feedback much more like a native app.
The person behind the site is the former CTO of BEA Systems (WebLogic). He wanted a better email system that was available anywhere. Grouping of discussion threads, saved searches (like Mac OS Tiger), etc. What this group has come up with is pretty darn interesting and if it's well designed will only get better.
The geek reading Slashdot ought to go read the Admin Guide available from Downloads_Documentation_Admin Guide (PDF or HTML). There are some real nice technical explanations not found in the marketing flash demo!
Before you continue to bash it, go check out the technical details while keeping in mind that it's new and will be improved as time moves forward. Linux, Apache Tomcat, PostFix, MySQL, OpenLDAP, SMTP, LMTP, SOAP, XML, IMAP, POP, and AJAX. You can connect with IMAP and POP clients! This means you might be able to connect via IMAP with OS X Mail.app which supports much of the threading, sorting and search features not found in Outlook. iCal can use the calendar system. Addressbook can connect to the LDAP directory for GAL entries. Pretty darn slick! Zimbra has certainly gotten my attention. If you have to you could use Outlook, but I would rather use the web interface then use Outlook! Ugh...
Should be interesting if someone decides to do the same thing in Ruby On Rails! Might be easier to build and maintain and thus faster to market with new features. Same technology except substituting Java and Tomcat for Ruby, the Rails API, plus Lighttpd & FCGI. Go take a look at Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List and you can see that http://www.37signals.com/ could easily build a similar system to Zimbra and make it sing! Or course the 37signals way of things is to host it for you and you subscribe to it. Zimbra is meant to be installed by your geeks with a support contract to Zimbra and consulting available. There also TextDrive's Strongspace Ruby on Rails app http://strongspace.com/. There is going to be an explosion of such applications being refreshed by AJAX powered feedback. AJAX is exciting as it can greatly improve the user experience. But that's all it does, the backend geekness is where the real fun begins. Whether it's Java or RoR things are going to start changing. Get ready for Web 2.0 without the Web 1.0 hype and dotbomb! You must have a viable business model to succeed with Web 2.0!