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."

Comments

Listen to those Talking Heads:

[smittyoneeach]

gadji beri bimba clandridi
lauli lonni cadori gadjam
a bim beri glassala glandride
e glassala tuffm i zimbra

bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

a bim beri glassala grandrid
e glassala tuffm i zimbra

gadji beri bimba glandridi
lauli lonni cadora gadjam
a bim beri glassasa glandrid
e glassala tuffm i zimbra

err, what?

[cosmocain]

and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in.

there ARE areas in life where you should NEVER EVER mix this one up. ;)

Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

They have been know to make horrible technology decisions in the past.

Oh my aching grammar!

[swajr]

Original:

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. Fixed:

Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to be challenging Microsoft in an area that Exchange has dominated. Maybe I'm a huge nerd, but grammatical errors like these drive me crazy!

Re:Oh my aching grammar!

[rdoger6424]

Up won't you anally retentive grammar nazis shut?

Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[Darundal]

What is it like setting up, using, maintaining, etc...?

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[Da Fokka]

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.

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[QuantumRiff]

I found it pretty simple. They have a pre-configured VMWare image you can download and play with, I found it incredibly handy and quick to play with. Seems pretty promising, but I don't know if I like the "offline client" it is a resource hog.. I would love to see them add a plugin for the thunderbird-sunbird calendar tools.

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[Doppleganger]

You can use sunbird/lightning just fine with Zimbra's iCal support, no additional plugin needed. The only thing lacking is the ability to send out meeting invites, but that doesn't seem to be in sunbird yet. Is there any other support you've found missing?

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[masonjd]

I've installed the Open Source version and am using it for my family email. It works great. The web interface is really impressive but I also have some family members connecting Thunderbird to it and it works without a hitch. Set up was a breeze. I used a HowToForge guide and it worked great. As for maintaining, the forums have been extremely useful. Overall I'm very pleased.

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[larkost]

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).

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[Not_Wiggins]

If you're setting this up for a small outfit (like, I host email for my friends/family), then the minimum requirements may be a bit high (cached link here.) On an Intel 32-bit machine (recommended at least 2GHz):
minimum memory: 2G
recommended memory: 4G.

That's for a box dedicated to being a mail server and webmail/calendaring client (forget about sharing it with other hosting needs, like a Webserver).

For a company (small or whatever), having a dedicated box for this sort of thing is reasonable and expected... and, please forgive the pun, the suite looks sweet. 8)

But, as an individual/uber-small hoster, those requirements put it outside the range of "host this on an old box."
That's not to say that Zimbra was targeted at me to start (so, please don't take it as a complaint). I just wanted to break the news (hopefully gently) to those hobbyists that were getting excited about hosting it. 8/

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[cooley]

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.

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

[dagar]

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.

Why'd comcast change?

[Red Flayer]

FTS:

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.

So let me get this straight -- we're finally getting an Open Source Exchange, and now you're hoping we have something that kills it?

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.

Re:Why'd comcast change?

[jmyers]

"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.

Re:Why'd comcast change?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There must be something huge in this that Exchange can not do or meet.

Maybe you're barking up the wrong tree completely. Do you actually think Comcast is using Exchange to supply mail service to all their customers? I'm one of those customers and I know they instructed me to use POP/IMAP for the protocols. I can't even imagine trying to scale an Exchange server up to that number of users. Maybe it is possible, but it seems highly unlikely.

I strongly suspect Comcast is migrating from Sendmail or some other common e-mail server that is built to scale well. I don't know where the idea that they are moving from Exchange come from though.

Not completely Open Source

[bleh-of-the-huns]

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.

Re:Not completely Open Source

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Most of the open source groupware systems seem to have a non-free "pro" or "enterprise" version. If you're looking for something that's completely open source, you might want to try out Citadel [http://www.citadel.org]. It is community-developed and doesn't have the multi-tiered approach. Fully turnkey, nothing to integrate manually, and it has a nice ajax-based front end too. An Outlook connector is currently in beta, too.

Re:Not completely Open Source

[Pav]

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.

It's worse than that - the Open Source license is "Attribware". Basically any fork must have large obnoxious ads linking back to the Zimbra website. This is a huge disincentive for anyone who wants to fork the project. If a project is stagnating or the company owning a project goes belly up the right to fork without caveats is critical.

I'm not worried though... There are a lot of promising and less restricted open source projects are in the works (Kolab, OpenGroupWare, Citadel etc...). Most projects like Zimbra die away after there's a legitimate free alternative even if the alternative isn't quite as good (eg. QT vs Gnome).

--Pav

Exchange compatibility NOT free / opensource

[ebonkyre]

Outlook sync is only available at the highest level of paid service.

Choices

[packethead]

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.

I would love to give it a shot

[shaitand]

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.

Re:I would love to give it a shot

[oldosadmin]

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.

Re:I would love to give it a shot

[shaitand]

That sounds like quite the pain in the ass. Just the same, it should be in the repository and the other pieces can be dependencies. Install Ubuntu server, enable repositories, apt-get update, apt-get install zimbra. At that point all the dependencies work themselves out and a basic functional zimbra with the most commonly needed configuration comes out of the box. After another 10 minutes or less of tweaking you have a zimbra server. AND you can run other services on it if you are putting it in an office with 10-20 users instead of 50,000!

They could go the easy route and have the package conflict with other MTA's (all that other stuff can just run on alternative ports). I know, I know, sounds like a great idea. Why don't I get right on that? *grumble grumble*

Re:I would love to give it a shot

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

Try it with VMware...

[wandazulu]

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.

Re:Too many problems with this

[Frosty Piss]

Are you French? No really. Because you SOUND French.

Not a comperable move

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Not a comperable move

[tenchiken]

Exchange is not a mail server. It is a messaging server (with integrated calendar functionality).


And I am just going to have to conclude that you know snot and didn't RTFA, or bother looking at the links in the submission. If you did, you would notice that Zimbra is also a messaging server (with integrated calendaring functionality), that also can manage directory services and is Open Source.

Either way, the product being touted is interesting, but your comment is crap.

Recursive grammar fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

I particularly liked the way you corrected your correction with a sentence that again demonstrated your previous error. DEATH TO EXCESSIVE CURSOR USAGE!

Nice Slashvertisement!

[DogDude]

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.

Re:I certainly hope ...

[aztracker1]

IIRC the plugin for Outlook (yeah, some people will still be using windows) isn't Free(Open-Source/GPL) and Evolution is Linux-Only afaik. There are some people that would switch their servers in a heartbeat, but given the commercial licensing costs of Zimbra, I couldn't recommend it over Windows Server (Web Edition) + SmarterMail... If I could get similar features in free/opensource software, for licensing costs that are less than web edition and smartermail, I would switch in a heartbeat.

I fully realize that Zimbra is way cool, and has a lot to offer... but I can't personally afford to recommend people loose their outlook functionality, or wind up paying more for licensing. Windows on the client desktop is still a bit of an uphill battle, the server switch is far easier... getting to a point were licensing is less than alternatives, or support is greater are your only options as a first step.

Just my opinion here, and this isn't meant to be flamebait.