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.
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