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Comcast Goes to Zimbra
tenchiken writes "Zimbra, an Open Source enterprise messaging app, just scored a major win. Comcast will be moving mail services to Zimbra for all of their customers. Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in. Add in support for Samba Domain Controllers and Linux Authentication, Offline Access and Evolution Support and we might finally have our long desired Open Source Exchange killer."
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e glassala tuffm i zimbra
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e glassala tuffm i zimbra
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lauli lonni cadora gadjam
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Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
there ARE areas in life where you should NEVER EVER mix this one up.
... this is successful. I would like to see (and have) other options available besides Exchange. Choice leads to competition, which gives innovation a kick in the pants and keeps prices in check. I just hope the switchover doesn't cause problems for my clients who currently use Comcast for e-mail services.
They have been know to make horrible technology decisions in the past.
What is it like setting up, using, maintaining, etc...?
Seriously, though, I'd be interested to see Comcast's reasoning on changing to Zimbra from Exchange -- might make it a lot easier to justify similar changes elsewhere.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Looking at the comparison between the open source version, and the commercial versions, much of the functionality that exchange excells in (namely corperate enterprise messeging), is not available in the OS version. The big glaring ones being outlook support and mobile support (atleast for me anyways). Although it is pretty slick, unless your paying for additional functionality, it is no exchange killer. However, I suspect licensing is significantly cheaper then exchange's licensing.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Outlook sync is only available at the highest level of paid service.
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
I did an eval on Zimbra vs. Scalix about a year ago. I decided to roll out Scalix, because at that time, Zimbra did not support mailbox delegation, did not have a mature Outlook MAPI connector (or one at all) and required too much DEU retraining. Scalix Web Access looks just like Outlook.
Now having just said this, Scalix is a pig! It' is unstable, uses A very clunky hack of Tomcat, has no backup or restore functionaility, the Outlook connector is missing key features that Outlook/Exchange users live by, and an incident-based support pricing model that, quite frankly, is a racket. (I know packethead, tell us what you really think).
I sincerly hope Zimbra has gotten more mature and can actually put a dent in M$'s dominance.
.sig
Try to migrate an Exchange installation to this product. After you submit your resignation to the client, you'll know what I mean. Any product that wants to seriously challenge MS Exchange must have a clear and *reliable* means of Exchange migration, to include the thousands of Exchange 5.5 sites that are still out there. Zimbra fails it.
(Before replying by regurgitating their marketing hype, please have tried yourself to convert major multi-site Exchange installations, 5.5 and above. Otherwise, pipe down with your uniformed self)
Even if you start anew with Zimbra, the obvious and glaring loss of popular (and even common) features is enough to cause full scale user revolt. Oh and do you have handhelds to sync? Guess what product you have to buy to sync them to Zimbra? You guessed it, Microsoft Outlook! (and Zimbra charges an extra license fee for that too).
It's Exchange killer at croporate level only if it can work with Blackberry (server).
The only problem is that Zimbra isn't in the Ubuntu repository. In fact, none of the so called exchange killers that I could find are in the Ubuntu repository.
They provide a pre-built virtual machine to try out a full installation with no setup.
I've played with it and it's basically "email server in a box"...just turn it on and point your mail app at it. I can't speak for specific features because it's been awhile now since I last checked it out.
If you were a real nerd/geek, you would not bother to fix this. You are a wanna be.
So, Comcast is moving customers from something to something else, and that means that one of those somethings compares with Microsoft Exchange. I'd have to presume that Exchange wasn't what Comcast is moving from. ISPs want mail servers. They expect that mail will be relatively independent between users. They presume that administrators want to have nothing to do with emails inside the email boxes. They presume that if a user calls up and says "I deleted an email and I want you to get it back" that a polite "go away" is a sufficient answer.
None of that has anything to do with what Exchange is aimed for. Exchange is not used for any major ISP that I'm aware of (not even Microsoft's public email services), nor should it be. Exchange is built to integrate with Domain Services. It's made so that you can have resource scheduling integrated with calendars and busy notification. It's made so that a secretary can log into her boss's account and check all his emails and send emails as herself or under his name as if he sent them himself. It's made so that when the idiot sends out the video of the latest commercial he thinks is cute that there is only one copy of the video on the server, and the emails point to it, rather than replicating it 1000 times.
Exchange is not a mail server. It is a messaging server (with integrated calendar functionality). This submission is written by someone that is either too stupid to know the difference, or who knows that the comparison is stupid and is just trying to drum up support for a product through misrepresentation. Either way, though the product being touted may be interesting, the submission is crap.
Learn to love Alaska
- The subscription model can make it price-competitive with Exchange, which is a hard sell in some places.
- The subscription model makes less than palatable for people who like to own their software. People have trouble buying software with a built-in poison pill.
- The more amusing features aren't part of the OS version (mobile support, Outlook connector, HA/DR)
Compared to Exchange on a Select agreement, or hosted Exchange, it's not bad at all. For smaller SMBs, though, it doesn't quite fit right.--srj/mmv
"Open Source Exchange killer"
...?
More like an open source Groupwise killer. Later on Novell. Wonder if Red Hat is going to be purchasing another company soon
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I've chosen citadel.org to keep my emails. Never seen something that easy to get in place and that easy to live with. No configuration hazards, and .debs in place. just add apt url, get it, done.
I particularly liked the way you corrected your correction with a sentence that again demonstrated your previous error. DEATH TO EXCESSIVE CURSOR USAGE!
Well, this is certainly a nice Slashvertisement, but I fail to see what Zimbra has to do with Exchange. The both do email, which is nice, but anybody who thinks that people use Exchange exclusively for email has no idea what they're talking about. You might as well say that GNUCash is a Quickbooks killer. But, I do hope that Slashdot was at least paid well for this ridiculous plug.
I don't respond to AC's.
I just started using it for a few clients and I wish I hadn't.
it's extremely peculiar to install,
it doesn't reside well with others,
it crashes and refuses to start for no apparent reason,
it has way to many log files to be troubleshoot,
it eats memory for breakfast,
it doesn't support installs in a custom directory.
it's their way or the highway.
Zimbra support is next to useless.
comcast is a bunch of morons for trying to use this as an enterprise suite.
it will work well with dedicated servers and dedicated staff.
They're using their grammar skills there.
- Resource scheduling, integrated in calendar with busy notification - Zimbra has that.
- Delegated accounts (secretary/boss) - Zimbra has that, for email and calendar.
- Single instance store (1000 copies sent, one copy on disk) - Zimbra has that
I'm not claiming that Comcast is planning to OFFER all of these features - but they certainly exist in Zimbra.The *REAL* Exchange killer will be CalDAV. Yet another proprietary calendaring/scheduling back end from Zimbra means competing with MS on their turf - and we all know how that always turns out. But when F/OSS apps implement open standards, they kick ass. Think HTTP/HTML - Apache. Think SMTP/POP/IMAP - Sendmail, Postfix, Cyrus, etc. These are the most important protocols and applications around. It's time to do the same with calendaring.
Proprietary calendaring solutions only extend as far as your local implementation. I want to coordinate my schedule with more people than that. I want my coordinate my calendar with my family, with my friends, with my vendors, with my collegues at other institutions, with local town events, with my kid's school - NOT just my co-workers. I don't want to care if they use webmail, crackberries, or whatever. This requires open standards. The standards exist. They are pretty new. Now we just need good reference implementations. If Zimbra does this, I predict they will own the market.
Bedework already supports CalDAV. Bedework/Sakai integration is taking place. Lightning and Sunbird work on top of CalDAV. CalDAV is happening. So Zimbra: please please please get on CalDAV, so we don't have to continue suffering the interminable curse of incompatible proprietary calendering protocols. As we've seen, when open standards take off, even Microsoft has to play along. It's time.
Zimbra really seems to want to be the only thing on a machine though. I've reverted to Mail.app and UW-IMAP until I get the gumption to build a machine just for Zimbra.
I'd agree that it's Enterprise Ready, having seen a couple admin friends roll it out to their enterprise, seems pretty sweet. Their licensing model looks pretty sane too. Full functionality in the OSS version, then pay extra for all the Exchange/Outlook integration features, hopefully that brings in enough cash to keep development going for all us folks that don't need those plugins.
I like music
I'm looking at the Admin manual and it seems like the only external authentication scheme supported is Active Directory. Looks like it can use OpenLDAP to store information about users, but the authentication itself is AD only. WTF??
o n_guide/5_Zimbra_LDAP.5.1.html#1036410
Can anyone clarify this?
http://www.zimbra.com/docs/ne/latest/administrati
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I've been hearing this for a decade now. Frankly I'm much more impressed with kerio Mail Server.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
OBM (http://obm.aliasource.org/), a true free messaging solution has already all that. ...
- full web interface with some ajax (drag & drop in calendar)
- multi-domain and multi-server handling
- auto configuration daemon for postfix (allowing ldap configuration while preserving local map performance)
- Outlook connector (the mapi way, only component that is not free)
- Thunderbird / Ligthning connector
- PDA connectivity via Funambol
- Support for Samba domain controller
- CRM functionnalities
- Projet management
-
This project is gaining great momentum in France where it surpasses Zimbra with projects up to 100 000 users, many ministries,...
We had an exchange killer at one point, Hula.. but Novell didn't release enough of the code and eventually stoped suporting the project.
From what I know its still opensource and could be taken up by people but there just dosnt seem to be intrest in it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
I will finally be convinced that any Linux based app is a Microsoft killer when slashdot stops touting it as a MS killer. Seems like everytime something is touted on /. as a MS killer, all it does is kill the web site that the article is on....then MS laughs all the way to the bank....
Um, there are hundreds of options available besides Exchange.
But, if you want to have something that actually embodies the few good features of Exchange without having to accept the fundamentally bad design and poor scalability, you should probably look at scalix.
I read the headline, and I thought "another company outsources from the U.S., but I've never heard of Zimbra. Is it in India, it sound more like somewhere in Africa." Then, it turns out to be another package with a completely meaningless name. Software names are getting to be too much like drug names, just cool sounding collections of letters.
If you are on a slower client, you now have the option of selecting 'Basic Client' when logging in - it's MUCH faster. The functionality is close to that of Exchange 2000's web component, not much interactivity, but when you're on a slow computer it's handy.
We've been using Zimbra for over a year now and I'm totally blown away by how much the system is continually improved upon. The Basic Client is a terrific example of how Zimbra user's needs are being gauged and met by the organization. Outstanding!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
IBM should go ahead by Zimbra. Zimbra has a cool webmail infra, IBM doesn't.
667 - one step ahead of the beast.