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.
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!
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.
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.
Yes, Zimbra is not just a webmail client you can slap on top of any IMAP/POP server. The reason for this is not malicious. It is just that a lot of the (compelling, if I may say so myself) functionality you see in ZCS - search, tags, conversations, group calendar, etc, etc - are only possible because of our own server.
On a related note, even though you have to use our server, and even though we love our UI dearly and we hope that you will too, we are client agnostic - we will support as many clients as we possibly can. Which is why we make your data available via IMAP/POP/RSS/iCal/etc.
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.