Zimbra: Its just so enterprise-like!
Zimbra is truly the answer to the open source mail+calendering+contact management application. I have been playing around, and more recently using in production, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, and all I can say is that it’s darn impressive.
While evaluating, I was always worried about the upgrade process – it seemed like pain for some software you run out of an ./install.sh script, that has its own versions of a web server, LDAP, database, and so on. In fact, reading the Single Server installation guide states:
Important. You cannot have any other web server, database, LDAP, or MTA server running, when you install the Zimbra software. If you have installed any of the applications, before you install Zimbra software, disable these applications.
However, this is fully configurable during the setup process – run it at another port besides port 80, and you’ve got the usage of Apache again. This might I add, even works for upgrades – it saves the configuration rather sensibly. It doesn’t recognize CentOS officially, and that might be something they should fix in the Community edition. A Zimbra appliance (on Ubuntu Server?) might be really cool – think about the possibilities of collaboration in a box.
As with anything, there are complaints. No live backup, unless you buy the Network edition? Though the promising thread means that people are interested in prodding this further (I know, I am). Backups are horrendous – stop the server, copy /opt/zimbra, then restart. /opt/zimbra is large. mailx seems to not be so sensible in working, any longer, which means logwatch doesn’t get emails out to the root user.
Today, I also decided to give Zimbra Desktop a twirl. They have installers for Windows, OS X and Linux. It installed fine on Fedora Core 6 (i.e. for its java requirements, gcj must’ve sufficed. UPDATE: They have their own, shipped, JRE.). At version 0.36, upon asking it to start, it does ask for the location of my web browser, which seems a little daft. When I send it to the path that Firefox has, it automatically shuts the installer down, making me think it might have crashed (actually, moving to the workspace with Firefox installed, shows that the desktop account manager configuration has started!). Lo and behold, at localhost:7633, Zimbra starts syncing everything and I’ve got my mail locally! I don’t need to use Thunderbird for mail, or Evolution for calendering – the Zimbra Desktop just brings it all right to me, in my browser, even when I’m offline.
The Zimbra Desktop is your exact Zimbra online experience, delivered to you offline. It performs a sync at 60 seconds by default, and you get the full experience of the client, in your web browser. Cross browser, cross platform, similarity. They mention they’ve not got a price yet for this, but if I were them, I’d not charge for it – the client, really, needs to be free for mass adoption (and of course work with the Community and Network Editions). Of course, the differentiation can come from things like attachment searches/HTML rendering, rebranding, support, and so forth. But email in your web browser that syncs with the online server, that in itself should be free – no crippling necessary.
Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra desktop, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, backup
Zimbra does look good from the begining… just that i have no time to play with it :P perhaps time to get itchy.. :)
Its amazing stuff. I’ve been palying with and using it for a while, and am quite confident in its day-to-day use, and administration.
I’d love it if someone split up the parts so you can use your exising postfix, ldap, tomcat etc. installs. Not only for reducing the admin load and backup size, and easing migration but also so their improvements can be pushed upstream. See http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/bloc/pivot/entry.php?id=266 for an excellent post on being an open source community member. Currently it appears that zimbra’s sourceforge SVN repo just gets updates pushed out from their private repository with no log information.
I really like the look of Zimbra.
I have used PHProjekt which works ok but it is not as polished as Zimbra.
However I can’t get Zimbra running on Fedora Core 6 64bit as it appears it is not supported yet. I’m not prepared to down grade as I have invested time setting up my server.
Does anyone know of a way around the Zimbra install problem. I have tryed all the suggestions on the posts in Zimbra support but I still get Error: attempting to install i386 packages on a x86_64 OS. Even though the Zimbra build I have is Enterprise Serve 64bit.
@james: I think the strength in Zimbra is that its not split up and its all one application. Splitting up can be a nightmare with different versions and so on.
@chris: I’m sure with some minor hackery, you can get it running on Fedora Core 6. AFAIK, the only supported OSes of the 4.x release are currently RHEL4 (and consequently, CentOS 4). If you were aiming to run on Fedora, it can’t be that much harder.
64-bit is a little bit of a problem I guess – you should be able to install i386 packages on x86_64. What kind of error is RPM giving you? I say a problem, because you’ll be running 32-binaries in a 64-bit environment. multiarch works quite well, i might add, on fedora and rpm based systems.
I have tried it out on 400MHz 512MB machine (still remember baby AT?). Its working without any problem at all. With CentOS 4, normal PHP & MySQL for my web, some torrentflux instances..
hmm.. no problem at all.. ok laa.. a little delay when its trying to read a folder which contain about 2000 emails & I have 10 folder with the same size. Anyway it is for personal use and no other people using it except me & my wife. So don’t use the same config for your org.
4 thumbs up! The zimbra is still live until today for about 2-3 months.
We’re considering Zimbra as the Mail-Server/ MTA for our small office of 35 users.
Our earlier implementation was a postfix implementation on Debian.
We may still choose to use a “thunderbird” client at the user interface, as during trials, the client takes too long to load-up.
Are there any other pitfalls to look out for?
We are keen to use the feature of “shared-folders” – is this likely to show up on Zimbra?
This is the first time I commented here and I should say that you give genuine, and quality information for other bloggers! Good job.
p.s. You have a very good template for your blog. Where have you got it from?