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Zimbra Collaboration Suite Launched
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Sep 28, 2005 12:57 AM
from the my-web-browser-is-tired-of-doing-all-the-work dept.
from the my-web-browser-is-tired-of-doing-all-the-work dept.
commonchaos writes "Recently a company named Zimbra has come out of nowhere and released an open source Exchange replacement. The exciting part is a front end that uses AJAX. There is an impressive flash demo, you can download the source or try out a "live" version of the code yourself." Interestingly, this open source system seems to be very similar to the recent Yahoo announcement covered on Slashdot.
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Technology: Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million 95 comments
TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has acquired the open source office suite Zimbra for $350 Million in cash. Zimbra has been in and out of the news over the last couple of years for their office suite, and recently launched offline capabilities. "The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers."
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What is the merit of replacing an Exchange server (Score:4, Interesting)
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product? I can see Microsoft's checklist features and see exactly what will be changed between this version of Exchange and the next, but I'm wondering what the benefits will be if I move away from Exchange.
I'm not a sysadmin, so I'm wondering what criteria you guys use when making the decision to jump ship.
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:4, Informative)
For one thing $$$ in future licensing fees.
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:2, Insightful)
Or to say it another way, money is cheap.
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:4, Informative)
If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:3, Interesting)
Public Folder functionality can be replaced with this:
Open Exchange Outlook Client [open-xchange.org]
Outlook will publish a summary of it's free busy data to the internet as opposed to publishing it to an exchange public folder:
Outlook free / busy information for Outlook 2003 [microsoft.com]
Overall if you do it right, the chances are actually that you will not only end up with a more robust system than what Exchange is. Especially if you buy it soon, you have the
Incorrect assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Just today I saw KDE goes wild on an SLES9SP2 system and nearly freeze it - the same fucking thing that used to happen back in 2000. Five years past by and not much has changed.
> That said if you need a "farm" of computers to run your mail and your company has fewer than 100,000 employees, I think the benefit of moving off Exchange should be obvious: you wouldn't need the farm any more.
You need directory services, scheduling, global address book, forms and sophisticated IMAP folder sharing even in a very small company (100 employees), so even in small-and-medium enterprises, people do need Exchange-like functionality and not only SMTP/IMAP/Webmail.
Dovecot: it's in alpha, for Christ's sake (http://www.dovecot.org/ [dovecot.org])
>If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
1. Software for managing AD: not really that expensive. On Linux you need to spend as much to write and maintain custom scripts, Webforms and what not.
2. Backup software: yes, because Exchange has its internal database format (i.e. it does not use only flat files). You can't back that up without suspending I/O to a consistent state which means you have to have an application-side plugin.
3. LVM: can't create crash-consistent snapshots of database files so what you say is incorrect, unless you meant snapshots of ordinary IMAP directories (incorrect comparison - database format vs. flat files). Besides, if you have VSS H/W Provider agent on Exchange server, you can take snapshots (on storage or the server itself), re-mount them and backup them using the regular Windows software.
Parent
Re:Incorrect assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
A huge number of people that got stuck with Exchange servers want to get rid of them. That's why these articles keep coming up.
What you meant was that you need the address book and directory services. Scheduling tends to be done by secretaries, and forms/IMAP folder sharing is generally not needed. Now if you say you *want* scheduling, etc, then fine, there are a number of quality products from which you can choose. If you define "what you need" to be the exact feature set of Exchange, then it isn't surprising that you think you need it. You can implement everything that Exchange/Outlook does with other software, cheaper, with more reliability, and on less hardware.
1. As for AD management software... let's see. You bought Windows Server because it's easy to use and admin, Exchange because it's easy to admin, and are using AD because it's easy to admin. So to do it right, you have to buy third party software? Sounds more like somebody screwed up their research and choose a bad solution based on broken assumptions. You have to do basically the same thing on any platform, so that's not a good reason to choose one over another. The UNIX solutions are much more reliable than Exchange, too, and less expensive. They also provide all the same functionality. Unless you go out of your way to ignore the solutions that work, anyway.
2. That's because Windows' does not provide functionality such as LVM. An application can also lock a file and prevent any app with any access level from even reading it. Exchange also keeps quite a lot open and locked when it doesn't need to. If the app was written well, it wouldn't be a problem. However, your backup explaination is an excellent example of why Windows is a huge pain in the ass.
3. BS, that is a perfectly valid comparison; backing up email is backing up email. If the application is written properly, the database will be fine. Exchange isn't written well, so it has problems. That software doesn't even provide a way to do a backup without either getting third party software or shutting Exchange down. Also, your VSS stuff is essentially the *exact same thing* as LVM snapshots. Why would your way work when LVM wouldn't? If the database is inconsistent, then it's inconsistent either way.
So what you're saying is that Windows/Exchange is better because it requires more jumping through hoops, buying more random software, and more dealing with random BS like bad data formats and bad storage techniques?
Parent
Server software (Score:3, Informative)
For commercial alternative designs, you have Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes. There are others, but I am familiar with those.
For commercial Exchange compatible, you have OpenXchange and openmail. Again, there are very likely others.
I can't think of any free software Exchange compatible server platforms. Personally, my research was t
Re:Incorrect assumptions (Score:3)
Jesus, why are you running a GUI on a mail server? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:4, Insightful)
You have got to be kidding me! Sendmail/Dovecot doesn't even approach the functionality of Exchange. Not even close. Dont' get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to not run Exchange, but lack of features is not one of them. There is a reason why Exchange uses so much resources. Microsoft programmers are not THAT incompetent. The bloat comes from feature creep, not so much bad programming. The question is, are you using all the features of Exchange? If not, one might consider something simpler like sendmail/IMP, but a lot of people like the group calendaring and all that.
-matthew
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a customer previously that we changed their business over to Linux, we gave them an "Exchange replacement" admittedly it wasn't as feature rich, but in a business of less than 100 employees, they weren't using a lot of the functionality anyway.
What they were getting
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:2)
Well, YMMV, but the last place where I worked that used Exchange had two incidents within a month of each other where some smart ass script-kiddie sent obscene messages to our entire (7+ million) userbase.
Naturally, those of us in California argued for abandoning the Exchange server and just using our existing, working FreeBSD/Sendmail server, but the PHB's back in Singapore decided that the solution was to stick with Exchange, and just cough up a
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:3, Insightful)
In any moderately sized organization, you'll have a big bunch of people whose only computing requirements will be:
- Web browser (for Internet and/or intranet sites)
- email
- scheduling (i.e. Outlook)
In theory, after the geeks, these should be the easiest people to migrate to a non-Windows desktop. Their requirements are minimal, and the retraining required
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:5, Informative)
In a small (but growing) business of a dozen employees, an old NT server SBS edition with Exchange 5.5 needed to be replaced. I decided to go with a Linux server.
On the Exchange side, what I didn't like was:
1. all email is in a proprietary database, in a single (huge!) file. If something goes wrong with that file (as it once did), it's a nightmare to bring it back up, if it works at all. If you can't repair it, you loose anything that came in after the last backup.
2. speaking of backups, Exchange needs special Exchange-aware backup programs. You cannot just copy the files.
3. Lack of flexibility in handling of incoming mail, spam filtering, forwarding, etc.
4. No ssh access for quick and easy remote administration.
5. No simple text-file based configuration, meaning no grep or such to find some setting. You have to move around all the menus if you cannot remember where a setting was.
6. It is hard to move away from proprietary solutions like Exchange because you cannot just copy files and hand them over to another application. That's a good reason to do it rather sooner than later when it may become harder yet. It was not easy to move mailboxes from Exchange to IMAP.
So in the new setup, I used Postfix and Courier IMAP:
1. very easy and very flexible and powerful configuration
2. all configuration through simple text files which can be grep-ed, compared, backed-up, whatever.
3. simple backups through plain file copies or rsync
4. every mail is in it's own plain text file. Can be grep-ed, and if a file goes corrupt (didn't happen yet), it is only that single email.
5. easy administration. For example, I didn't implement quotas, but I'm considering setting up a little script that would check for the size of the maildirs and of single huge files, and send a little email to the users. Like "you are using up 1 GB for emails; please consider removing unnecessary stuff" or "Would you please check if you still need the 50 10 MB files in you mailbox". I can easily add a summary of the huge mails so the user knows which ones they are.
5. easy migration. If I ever decide I would like to replace Postfix or Courier with some other program, it's no problem. I'm not locked in the current programs. Not that I would want to move to other programs. I'm very happy with this setup. But I like to be sure I can if I ever wish to.
This has been running reliably for 6 months now, and I'm a very happy mail admin.
The users have only one complaint: they cannot set up an Out of Office auto-responder like they could on Exchange. I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success. They want it anyway. So I'm setting up vacation in their
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:4, Interesting)
Outlook 2000
After?
Outlook 2003, alas!
The upgrade from Office 97 with Outlook 2000 to Office/Outlook 2003 was not easy. So during a few days, they used Thunderbird for email. Easy to set up, always works, leaves mails on the server (the way I set it up), no hassles.
But most users wanted Outlook. Only 2 still use Thunderbird. Probably my fault: I didn't do any training for Thunderbird. So I suspect that apart from the mushy Fisher-Price TB icons, their problem with TB was mainly that they thought they couldn't do some things because they didn't look in the menus. Nobody was able to give me rational reasons why they preferred Outlook. Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore?
There is no shared calendar, but nobody was using that anyway. If they do want that some day, I don't know what I could use for that and it may be a problem.
There is no central Exchange address book, but that was not needed. They have their own database with all the business contacts, including emails. If needed later, I can set up an LDAP solution or whatever.
Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
- Free and excellent antivirus (ClamAV)
- Free and excellent spam filtering (a couple of RBLs, header checks in Postfix, and Spamassassin to mark the remaining spam as such)
- Remote administration through SSH. That is not only an admin benefit, but also a user benefit. With Exchange, if they had a problem/question/requirement, they had to wait for me to come by. Now, I can act immediately over SSH. (Of course, you can setup VNC to manage a GUI, but it is slow and clunky). There are also answers I can give them straight away by looking at the logs (X says he didn't get my email / Yes he did; mail.x.com accepted the mail at 12h32; he should ask his own mail admin. I didn't get the email from Y / True, it was rejected because it was 20 MB. etc.)
What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Nothing special. There is no particular need. There are no "prying eyes" inside the network, and they do regularly have their mail read by someone else to whom they give their password (it's not a bug, it's a feature).
There is no WiFi on the network. I try to explain to them they should use better passwords anyway, but most don't care.
As an admin, I can of course read everything if I want. But I don't want to, and more importantly, they have to fully trust their network admin. If they don't, they need to find another admin quickly anyway. In this regard, network admins are like bookkeepers and doctors. You cannot have one whom you don't trust.
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't underestimate the power of the common. They're used to it, they have friends and colleagues that use it, it's become a bit like Xerox-ing something. Or Google-ing. Maybe less so, but since everyone's using it, your users want it as well. They don't want to be "stuck" with another (inferior? They don't know!) product. (Yes yes, I know it's great, have been using it for over a year and am never switching back to Outlook.)
An
Re:Autoresponders aren't bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I do believe they are.
There are basically 2 cases:
1. You don't get important mail needing an urgent reply: the uselessness is obvious
2. You do get important mail needing an urgent reply: the autoresponder replies that you are away. Useless again.
Email is not a phone, where you get the answering machine *before* saying your message and can decide to call somewhere else instead.
Email is closer to a fax. Would you like your fax spitting out pages of "sorry we cannot read
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:4, Informative)
Why I moved off of Exchanve Server -- I wanted my data in open formats and out of the "black box" that Exchange Server is. We moved to Exchange4Linux [exchange4linux.com], which stores everything (and I mean everything) in a PostgreSQL database (18G and growing). SMTP is whatever you want, but Postfix is what they recommend. I've tried practically every Exchange replacement out there (SLES/SLOX, OpenExchange, a plethora of web-based crap, Bynari, Steltor (now Oracle's) CorporateTime, Hitachi's solution, etc., etc.) and this one is the (clear) winner in my eyes. The entire thing is written in Python, including the Outlook connector, and everything but the connector is open-source. (Outlook connectors are EUR$50/seat with discounts for volume). We still run Outlook on the desktops since that is the user interface and many here still want it, but as far as the backend is concerned, I couldn't be happier now. There is something just plain cool about being able to run arbitrary SQL queries over all of the company's emails, contacts, todos, journals, you name it... We have it tying in to our Asterisk [asterisk.org] PBX as well so, for example, the service guy who's on call gets the emergency page. The service department just maintains their Pager Calendar and I do a lookup to see who's on duty.
E4L isn't without its warts (the IMAP server is still in early development, no POP or LDAP yet), but being Open Source and also being in active development, these get polished or cut out (as necessary) in time. And I can add/change the system and get my changes contributed back. I don't have to worry about where my data went to or if the system ever crashes how to recover the data. If some weird-ass situation comes up and I need to correlate my data in some unforseen way... well now I can, and I don't need some kind of screwed-up and possibly commercial API to get it done. And most importantly for me, I don't have to worry about the system changing or being eliminated due to some other company's paradigm shift.
Parent
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:3, Informative)
Freaking Amazing (Score:2)
Interesting. Too bad it costs too little. (Score:3, Interesting)
I briefly looked around Zimbra's site, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like another free-as-in-speech replacement software suite. I don't see the PHB's getting excited about this until they have to pay good money for it.
Re:Interesting. Too bad it costs too little. (Score:2)
You can always burn it to CD and sell it to them (with the source code and GNU license included at no extra charge) for $500,000 per CD. Would that be expensive enough to get them excited?
Free software has already won (Score:2, Funny)
Dependency hell squared (Score:3, Insightful)
And for anyone who was confused, it's not a drop-in replacement for Exchange servers or clients, it just does what Exchange does, differently. More or less, I guess, not having used it yet
Still, looks like a pretty cool piece of work.
Re:Dependency hell squared (Score:3, Interesting)
1. They built EL4 rpm, which gives me hope that it's been tested well on this platform
2. Zimbra provides an easy way to import Exchange accounts straigth from the server, without having to handle hundreds of pst files
3. This is the last piece of software that prevents us from getting rid of windows on the desktop.
This is good stuff. My sysadmin life looks
Requires it's own server for everything (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Requires it's own server for everything (Score:2, Informative)
There are other alternatives (Score:2)
Re:Requires it's own server for everything (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Requires it's own server for everything (Score:3, Informative)
Any other solution, a paper folder on a desk with a bunch of business cards in it is better than maximizer.
We had stability problems, issues getting support and the UI was not very intuitive at all
Overall, it was decided that the old system was better and that they would go back after god knows how much money they spent on training and everything else.
Re:Requires it's own server for everything (Score:5, Informative)
On a related note, even though you have to use our server, and even though we love our UI dearly and we hope that you will too, we are client agnostic - we will support as many clients as we possibly can. Which is why we make your data available via IMAP/POP/RSS/iCal/etc.
Parent
Re:Requires it's own server for everything (Score:3, Informative)
"The leader in open source collaboration"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I'm not overly impressed with their "impressive flash demo". This story seems like another new company's attempt to drum up hype by submitting their press-release to Slashdot as a news item. The flash demo is neat and all, but I'd be more impressed if their "live" demo was actually working... If it can't handle a simple Slashdotting, it ain't ready for prime-time.
Stop hammering the site! (Score:5, Informative)
Use coral cache instead!
Flash Demo [nyud.net]
Zimbra homepage [nyud.net]
Why, oh why can't Slashdot always link to coral cache instead of keep on killing servers?
Re:Stop hammering the site! (Score:3, Insightful)
Same reason as ever. People live behind corporate firewalls. Get a coral-like system that works on port 80 and you're on to a winner. Until then, not gonna happen.
Want something different from exchange (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Want something different from exchange (Score:3, Informative)
Phillip.
Re:Want something different from exchange (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one, have no interest in going anywhere near Hula. With that kind of obnoxious hubris, I'd rather go with any of the other quality products in the open source collaboration space.
Parent
If its easier to use the Open-Xchange... (Score:2)
Just watch the demo (Score:4, Interesting)
But watch the demo. The first part sucks, I agree. Oooh, it does conversations! Big whoop.
But the end is interesting. It starts with the dates -- that's nicely integrated. Then for some serious, customer integration. Custom actions based on pattern matching is pretty cool. If it's easily scriptable, it could be pretty powerful.
Most of the features can be taken for granted. Yes, the marketoids got to it. But dude, if this has a clean API and doesn't suck on the backend, it might be useful.
We are deploying this now (Score:4, Informative)
The really cool part we see in Zimbra is the possibilities to program our own magic phrases, so everytime someone puts in an Order#, SKU, Invoice# or some other keyword, Zimbra will pick up on it, and link it directly into our ERP.
Zimbra shows a lot of promise--
OpenGroupware.org is very interesting as well (Score:3, Informative)
It may not have the fancy Javascripted front-end but it is certainly loaded with useful features for groups of people working together.
Contacts, Calendar, Email, File repository using WebDav (Files are version controlled) and more.
Sadly... (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, I think this is a good as web applications are going to get. Lets face it people, HTML and web browsers are just not made to run desktop style applications. AJAX is really cool, but the simple fact is that HTML lacks the most basic tools to build a good GUI. The document model just doesn't work for sophisticated applications.
-matthew
RTFA - Dig a little deeper before you post! (Score:3, Informative)
If you actually look at the details, it's a Linux based (Red Hat RPM distro at the moment) that appears to be the absolute best web email system I've seen to date. AJAX is only a very small part of what Zimbra does. AJAX simply improves the end user browser experience by making it feel more like a local application and less like a web app. AJAX allows for page updates without reloading the whole page so it can add features like drag and drop, right-clicking context menus, live searches, etc. i.e. faster instant feedback much more like a native app.
The person behind the site is the former CTO of BEA Systems (WebLogic). He wanted a better email system that was available anywhere. Grouping of discussion threads, saved searches (like Mac OS Tiger), etc. What this group has come up with is pretty darn interesting and if it's well designed will only get better.
The geek reading Slashdot ought to go read the Admin Guide available from Downloads_Documentation_Admin Guide (PDF or HTML). There are some real nice technical explanations not found in the marketing flash demo!
Before you continue to bash it, go check out the technical details while keeping in mind that it's new and will be improved as time moves forward. Linux, Apache Tomcat, PostFix, MySQL, OpenLDAP, SMTP, LMTP, SOAP, XML, IMAP, POP, and AJAX. You can connect with IMAP and POP clients! This means you might be able to connect via IMAP with OS X Mail.app which supports much of the threading, sorting and search features not found in Outlook. iCal can use the calendar system. Addressbook can connect to the LDAP directory for GAL entries. Pretty darn slick! Zimbra has certainly gotten my attention. If you have to you could use Outlook, but I would rather use the web interface then use Outlook! Ugh...
Should be interesting if someone decides to do the same thing in Ruby On Rails! Might be easier to build and maintain and thus faster to market with new features. Same technology except substituting Java and Tomcat for Ruby, the Rails API, plus Lighttpd & FCGI. Go take a look at Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List and you can see that http://www.37signals.com/ [37signals.com] could easily build a similar system to Zimbra and make it sing! Or course the 37signals way of things is to host it for you and you subscribe to it. Zimbra is meant to be installed by your geeks with a support contract to Zimbra and consulting available. There also TextDrive's Strongspace Ruby on Rails app http://strongspace.com/ [strongspace.com]. There is going to be an explosion of such applications being refreshed by AJAX powered feedback. AJAX is exciting as it can greatly improve the user experience. But that's all it does, the backend geekness is where the real fun begins. Whether it's Java or RoR things are going to start changing. Get ready for Web 2.0 without the Web 1.0 hype and dotbomb! You must have a viable business model to succeed with Web 2.0!
Re:Flash Demo (Score:2)
Re:Crap (Score:2)
Frequently, it is unnecessarily difficult to implem
Re:Crap (Score:2)