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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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
a 303KB 900x675 GIF (with no alt tag) to tell me I need to download the Flash plugin.
That'll impress the folks on dial-up.
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
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?
The Zimbra architecture for scaling mailboxes across hardware boxes is a lot closer to the cyrus-imap way of scaling - don't let the presence of tomcat/mysql mislead you into thinking otherwise!
You can have M postfix boxes route mail to N mailbox server boxes. Each of those N mailbox servers is/runs the { tomcat, mysql, filesystem } triple. Instead of one huge database with all your users' metadata, you partition your users across these each of these mailbox servers' database instances. Postfix can route mail via LMTP to one of those N mailbox servers where the mailbox actually lives (we use transport_maps). The Zimbra web UI served up from each of these mailbox servers can redirect the user to the mailbox server on which their mailbox actually lives - eg, think of mail.yahoo.com which redirects you to us.f300.mail.yahoo.com. In the future, don't rule out us making this even more transparent. Someone we know, in a multi-node install test, configured perdition (the IMAP proxy) to consult user info from LDAP and proxy IMAP connection over to the user's actual mailbox server.
See also this thread on our forums.
I was waiting for someone to mention Hula. And I'm waiting for Hula to support caldav. Hula is a dream to set up and administer. It's been rock solid for me, and soon will have an AJAX webmail interface. As soon as I can use caldav with Sunbird then I can ditch using remote calendars via webdav and rely on Hula completely.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
ZCS server logs all operations to a journal we call "redolog" - used for crash recovery and incremental backups - a safety net across the three different ways we store data (db, lucene indices, and plain rfc822 files). But redolog can also be used for master/slave replication. So while we have support for partitioning mailboxes across servers (any mailbox lives on only one of these active servers), you can, in addition, replicate each of these mailbox servers to standby servers if you want.
If you have a SAN, you will probably want to use a shared-disk failover/takeover?
We do not use tomcat sessions and we do not need them. We have our own session objects. We (carefully) cache mailbox change information in these session objects for notification purposes. Replicating these session objects will make it a fully distributed session object, and therefore expensive. We also like the locality of the session object wrt where the mailbox lives.
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!