Rob Thompson

Looking back a few years, I remember seeing the the fledgling Zimbra project. My first thoughts were that it was a noble effort, but had little hope for long-term survivability under the shadow of the powerful and all-consuming MS Exchange product. So, I’m absolutely ecstatic to have been proven wrong by this now very large company. The mountain to climb for innovate Email tools is huge. For years, Outlook users have been silently enjoying the group collaboration features of the Exchange/Outlook duo, to the point where it is considered the defacto standard by which other products are measured. The functionality of Outlook/Exchange has, until now, gone completely unmatched by any other packaged solution.

Amazingly, Zimbra has outgrown its “noble effort” image. The product now offers every collaboration feature that exchange does, but adds a whole new direction to email and group collaboration that is likely going to reverse the prevailing perspective and finally out-shadow Exchange.

I don’t have to list the features that make this product a winner as you already know them. Think of Zimbra as a fully functional replacement for Exchange, just to establish a baseline, then add on real innovation like uncompromising web-based collaboration tools and a devotion to implementing open standards. As of the GA release 5.0 this week, you could pull your old, tired Exchange server out and replace it with a Zimbra server and your users would not know the difference (literally). This alone is going to prove to be a direction setter for the email industry. Zimbra is a true success story and proves the viability of opensource tools for real-world business applications.