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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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 ..
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
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
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...
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.
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!