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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.
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.
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!
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.
Well that makes it sound ideal for me. For small business clients, we've always defaulted to a program called Maximizer, but some aren't willing to spend the $169 per seat. If anyone is familiar with Maximizer, would you consider Zimbra a fair replacement? Any other suggestions?
For FC3:F C3.tgz.torrent
http://downloads.zimbra.com/3.0_M1/zcs-3.0.M1_21.
I tried building this for Slackware 10.1 over the weekend and only had to install ant and jdk.
It comes with everything included: mysql, spamassassin, tomcat and postfix.
One issue were the required port mappings:
smtp: 25 mapped to 7075
http: 80 mapped to 7070
pop3: 110 mapped to 7110
imap: 143 mapped to 7143
ldap: 389 mapped to 7389
https: 443 mapped to 7443
imaps: 993 mapped to 7993
pop3s: 995 mapped to 7995
The install/run scripts were very tailored for RH/Fedora.
This page has a good walkthrough of a developer install.
make dev-install got me going on the right path.
It was unfortunate that I ran out of weekend before getting it to work as I really liked the look of the calendaring integration and overall interface.
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.
We are upgrading servers to RHEL4 and heavily contemplating move from Exchange to something else. This stuff looks pretty exciting for 3 main reasons:
1. They built EL4 rpm, which gives me hope that it's been tested well on this platform
2. Zimbra provides an easy way to import Exchange accounts straigth from the server, without having to handle hundreds of pst files
3. This is the last piece of software that prevents us from getting rid of windows on the desktop.
This is good stuff. My sysadmin life looks so much better already.
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
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 ..
First thing first, why in the hell are you running KDE on a server, and more important, why are you running an X server on one at all?
A huge number of people that got stuck with Exchange servers want to get rid of them. That's why these articles keep coming up.
What you meant was that you need the address book and directory services. Scheduling tends to be done by secretaries, and forms/IMAP folder sharing is generally not needed. Now if you say you *want* scheduling, etc, then fine, there are a number of quality products from which you can choose. If you define "what you need" to be the exact feature set of Exchange, then it isn't surprising that you think you need it. You can implement everything that Exchange/Outlook does with other software, cheaper, with more reliability, and on less hardware.
1. As for AD management software... let's see. You bought Windows Server because it's easy to use and admin, Exchange because it's easy to admin, and are using AD because it's easy to admin. So to do it right, you have to buy third party software? Sounds more like somebody screwed up their research and choose a bad solution based on broken assumptions. You have to do basically the same thing on any platform, so that's not a good reason to choose one over another. The UNIX solutions are much more reliable than Exchange, too, and less expensive. They also provide all the same functionality. Unless you go out of your way to ignore the solutions that work, anyway.
2. That's because Windows' does not provide functionality such as LVM. An application can also lock a file and prevent any app with any access level from even reading it. Exchange also keeps quite a lot open and locked when it doesn't need to. If the app was written well, it wouldn't be a problem. However, your backup explaination is an excellent example of why Windows is a huge pain in the ass.
3. BS, that is a perfectly valid comparison; backing up email is backing up email. If the application is written properly, the database will be fine. Exchange isn't written well, so it has problems. That software doesn't even provide a way to do a backup without either getting third party software or shutting Exchange down. Also, your VSS stuff is essentially the *exact same thing* as LVM snapshots. Why would your way work when LVM wouldn't? If the database is inconsistent, then it's inconsistent either way.
So what you're saying is that Windows/Exchange is better because it requires more jumping through hoops, buying more random software, and more dealing with random BS like bad data formats and bad storage techniques?
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 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
Perhaps because they're not 'useless'...
... or 'evil'
:-)
I do believe they are.
There are basically 2 cases:
1. You don't get important mail needing an urgent reply: the uselessness is obvious
2. You do get important mail needing an urgent reply: the autoresponder replies that you are away. Useless again.
Email is not a phone, where you get the answering machine *before* saying your message and can decide to call somewhere else instead.
Email is closer to a fax. Would you like your fax spitting out pages of "sorry we cannot read your fax right now. signed: friendly fax machine at recipient.com"?
In the case of 2., the obvious solutions are:
- you read your business mail while away and do something about those which seem to require a quick reply.
- someone else in the office reads your email and does what has to be done.
evil was probably not the right word to use. But among the stupid/bad things autoresponders do:
- spam some poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a virus
- spam another poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a spammer
- burden your server's mail queue with mails to fake addresses
- confirm your email to a spammer
and of course, in the worst case:
- reply to a mailing list (on which someone else also has an autoresponder). This actually still happens, even though the programs involved never seem to be the ones I use (Mailman and vacation).
Anyway, if people still want an autoreponder after having understood all this, then so be it.
his is the sort of anecdote which gives the open source push a bad name
They don't really know or care about OSS. If someone gets a bad name, it's not OSS, it's me. And I get bothered with setting up their autoresponders. At least I know it's configured properly and will not flood mailing lists. And I will find a way so they can all set it up themselves.
I agree that as mail admin, it's not my role to impose my views about the "correct" use of email. But I did try to explain them. Too bad I was unsuccessful, and probably a sign that I was right in not trying a career in politics...