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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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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.
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
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.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
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).
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
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
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/
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
I particularly liked the way you corrected your correction with a sentence that again demonstrated your previous error. DEATH TO EXCESSIVE CURSOR USAGE!
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*
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