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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."
We (a small IT company) have been using it for a couple of months now and my experiences are very good. Of course I don't know how well Zimbra will scale, but for us it works really wel. I do have some minor complaints (for instance, when creating a new mail filter I'd like to have the option to apply the filter to the existing e-mails), but on the whole I'm quite content.
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.
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"Seriously, though, I'd be interested to see Comcast's reasoning on changing to Zimbra from Exchange"
I very seriously doubt that comcast is switching from exchange. The article does not say. They are probably switching from sendmail + some webmail app to Zimbra.
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.
Except that Zimbra uses iCal, not CalDAV, so you can't use the calendars from multiple computers at once. They do have a really nice iSync plugin on the Mac side that allows you to sync your calendars out of iCal.app, and that winds up having the same effect.
I am trying to get them to allow you to disable the automatic event notification emails that go out to people you put on the events (this is really annoying when you want to do these notifications yourself).
This is for the customer facing email, which as I recall is pretty standard SMTP stuff, internal systems will still run Exchange.
As far as "why this package", I couldn't tell you. I wasn't in on those discussions.
Yes, I work for Comcast.
That's because zimbra basically takes over your whole system. Own web+tomcat server. Own MTA. Own LDAP+MySQL. Own Amavis. We basically setup a RHEL box with Zimbra and said "it's an appliance" and let it do the zimbra thing.
Jay | http://oldos.org
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.
One of the open source Exchange killers is Citadel, which there definitely are .deb's and repositories for. The reason you won't find Zimbra, Scalix, etc. there is because those products are not "true" open source; they're basically just stripped down versions of commercial products. The only reason Zimbra and Scalix are quasi open source in the first place is because they needed access to open source components like Postfix, MySQL, etc. Citadel is true community-developed open source.
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Don't let those specs get you down too much, friend. I'm successfully running Zimbra (Open Source Edition) on a box nowhere near those specs:
I just recently put together a Zimbra server for my company. We'll move it to a better machine (with a SCSI RAID5 Array) later, but I built it on an old machine just to make sure Zimbra was what we were looking for in a new mail server to replace our Red Hat w/Sendmail box (and boy, is it ever!).
The machine I'm running it on is an 800MHz Duron with 1.0 GB of RAM and two 40GB IDE drives. It's running an unmodified Ubuntu Dapper Drake "Desktop" install.
Besides Zimbra, the only services I've added to the box are VNCServer and BIND.
This server supports mail and calendering for about 15 employees, including a helpdesk used by our outside clients.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
We got hit with a virus on our Exchange server a little over a year ago. We migrated to Zimbra. We have about 65 users. The conversion went pretty smooth. Administration is very simple. They made an excellent admin gui. It is very easy to do every day tasks with it. The 1 feature that I miss is tasks/todos. This is supposed to come in version 5 due out in October, along with having IM, documents (wiki), and some other features.
Full system recovery is a little rocky, but is being adressed.
My favorite feature is the search capabilities. I can do all kinds of searching for emails/contacts that I could not do in Outlook/Exchange 2000.