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. ;)

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.