Rob Thompson

Zimbra is a full featured email and collaboration suite that is currently rivaling and surpassing Microsoft Exchange in features. As a devoted Qmail fan, and avid do-it-yourself emailer, I was at first skeptical about the platform when I first saw it. To be honest, before I got to know it, I had pinned Zimbra to be yet another hyped-up web 2.0 app without the substance/innovation behind it to make it worthwhile. Since then, I have learned many thing that have surprised me about Zimbra Collaboration Suite, among these:

First: Zimbra is a 100% complete email and collaboration solution including MTA, web-based email, spam filtering, anti-virus, etc., i.e. it is not just a web front-end that leaves you to figure out the rest of the stuff. You start with a basic bare-bones UNIX installation and 20 minutes later you have the whole enchilada. The installation, soup-to-nuts is easy, well developed and doable by anybody with basic UNIX system administration experience.

Second: The open source version of Zimbra Collaboration Suite is full featured and has everything and more that most want or expect from an email solution including: unlimited users, multiple domain support, class of service provisioning, intelligent anti-spam/anti-virus system, aliases, calendaring (iCal, CalDav, etc.), email filters, tasks, file sharing and countless other bells and whistles. The open source version has it all, leaving no gotchas. This is really quite remarkable as Zimbra is a company that gains profits. Zimbra’s bread and butter is with corporate customers. Especially the fact that you can literally rip out your exchange server and its mandatory Active Directory servers, etc., and replace them with a pay-for version of the Zimbra Collaboration suite and Outlook/mobile users won’t know the difference.

Third: Zimbra has recently made a 15-user version of their pay-for Network Edition available to users with small installations for $399/year. The Network Edition of Zimbra adds full MAPI Outlook connectivity, hot backup, clustering and most everything else that makes their product an Exchange killer.

I’ve been running a Zimbra server for 4 months now on a cheap Linode and could not be happier. I will soon post an article about how to install and tune an open source Zimbra server on a low-cost Virtual Machine with minimal ram.

For a demo of the Zimbra front-end, visit: http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php