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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Same reason as ever. People live behind corporate firewalls. Get a coral-like system that works on port 80 and you're on to a winner. Until then, not gonna happen.
-- I like the cut of your thinking, young man. - me.
Hula is way too much hype and way too much hubris. Look at how polite the Zimbra people were: "Here's our new product, we hope you like it." Compare with the Hula project, which made the ridiculous (and clearly false) claim that "no other projects exist in this space" and then speak of "taking over the world." It's a project which basically consists of abandonware (NetMail failed in the marketplace) plus vaporware (Nat Friedman's hype machine) and they're already claiming it to be "the Apache of collaboration."
I, for one, have no interest in going anywhere near Hula. With that kind of obnoxious hubris, I'd rather go with any of the other quality products in the open source collaboration space.
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