Zimbra Collaboration Suite Launched 207
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.
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.
"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.
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: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 should also be minimal.
The problem has always been, for these people, in replacing Outlook. Outlook is a key tool for many sites, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been a true drop-in replacement in the FOSS world that has allowed users to ditch Outlook as part of a migration away from Windows. Tools like Evolution are great, but they mandate a switch to Gnome, and that means moving away from Windows at the same time in a big-bang approach. Lots of cost-sensitive IT shops want to migrate away from Windows, but aren't prepared to take the risk of that big-bang changeover - they'd rather put in an alternative to Outlook, bed it in, then at some later date move off Windows once they're sure all their requirements are covered.
If Zimbra has a decent Web-based client (can't tell - site is
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.
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
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.)
Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Oh, if only admins could all be like that!
Re:What is the merit of replacing an Exchange serv (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Jesus, why are you running a GUI on a mail server? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.