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."

Listen to those Talking Heads:

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?

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. ;)

I certainly hope ...

... this is successful. I would like to see (and have) other options available besides Exchange. Choice leads to competition, which gives innovation a kick in the pants and keeps prices in check. I just hope the switchover doesn't cause problems for my clients who currently use Comcast for e-mail services.

Comcast

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

Oh my aching grammar!

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!

Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

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

Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra?

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?

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?

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?

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. [64.233.167.104]) 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?

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.

Why'd comcast change?

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.

Not completely Open Source

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

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 [citadel.org] [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.

Exchange compatibility NOT free / opensource

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

Choices

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

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

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

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

One of the open source Exchange killers is Citadel [citadel.org], 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...

They provide a pre-built virtual machine [vmware.com] 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.

Not a comperable move

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.

It's nice..

..but it has a few strikes against it, at least for SMBs:

• The subscription model can make it price-competitive with Exchange, which is a hard sell in some places.
• The subscription model makes less than palatable for people who like to own their software. People have trouble buying software with a built-in poison pill.
• The more amusing features aren't part of the OS version (mobile support, Outlook connector, HA/DR)

Compared to Exchange on a Select agreement, or hosted Exchange, it's not bad at all. For smaller SMBs, though, it doesn't quite fit right.

Open source NOVL killer

"Open Source Exchange killer"

More like an open source Groupwise killer. Later on Novell. Wonder if Red Hat is going to be purchasing another company soon ...?

Nice Slashvertisement!

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.

zimbra kills nothing

I just started using it for a few clients and I wish I hadn't.

it's extremely peculiar to install,
it doesn't reside well with others,
it crashes and refuses to start for no apparent reason,
it has way to many log files to be troubleshoot,
it eats memory for breakfast,
it doesn't support installs in a custom directory.
it's their way or the highway.

Zimbra support is next to useless.

comcast is a bunch of morons for trying to use this as an enterprise suite.
it will work well with dedicated servers and dedicated staff.

I've really wanted to play with this

Zimbra really seems to want to be the only thing on a machine though. I've reverted to Mail.app and UW-IMAP until I get the gumption to build a machine just for Zimbra.

I'd agree that it's Enterprise Ready, having seen a couple admin friends roll it out to their enterprise, seems pretty sweet. Their licensing model looks pretty sane too. Full functionality in the OSS version, then pay extra for all the Exchange/Outlook integration features, hopefully that brings in enough cash to keep development going for all us folks that don't need those plugins.

Really has Linux Autentication?

I'm looking at the Admin manual and it seems like the only external authentication scheme supported is Active Directory. Looks like it can use OpenLDAP to store information about users, but the authentication itself is AD only. WTF??

Can anyone clarify this?

http://www.zimbra.com/docs/ne/latest/administratio n_guide/5_Zimbra_LDAP.5.1.html#1036410 [zimbra.com]

-matthew

Yawn

I've been hearing this for a decade now. Frankly I'm much more impressed with kerio Mail Server.

Hula?

We had an exchange killer at one point, Hula.. but Novell didn't release enough of the code and eventually stoped suporting the project.

From what I know its still opensource and could be taken up by people but there just dosnt seem to be intrest in it.

A long protracted death

I will finally be convinced that any Linux based app is a Microsoft killer when slashdot stops touting it as a MS killer. Seems like everytime something is touted on /. as a MS killer, all it does is kill the web site that the article is on....then MS laughs all the way to the bank....

Re:Too many problems with this

Oh and do you have handhelds to sync? Guess what product you have to buy to sync them to Zimbra? You guessed it, Microsoft Outlook! (and Zimbra charges an extra license fee for that too).

I do believe that Zimbra includes a SyncML server, which should enable you to sync your calendar/events/contacts from anywhere you can reach the server over the internet. I have seen great SyncML clients from Synthesis, and there are several free-beer and/or free-speech syncML clients for PDA's out there..

Re:Too many problems with this

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

Re:Too many problems with this

Zimbra offers a tool for migrating from an exchange server, and a tool for importing a local PST file. (Aimed at admins and users, respectively). Syncing handhelds does not require the purchase of outlook - that information is just plain wrong.

Even if you start anew with Zimbra, the obvious and glaring loss of popular (and even common) features is enough to cause full scale user revolt.

You have a list?

Re:Not an Exchange killer yet

CalDAV support is being written in svn at the moment so may be in the next major release