Zimbra - Web/Ajax Based Outlook
Michael Arrington
15 comments »
Company: 
We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.
When you first view the Zimbra demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is a web based version of Word.
At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.
There are some core differences between how Zimbra and Writely approach their respective markets, however. Writely is a proprietary, hosted application (although they import and export in Word and other formats). Zimbra is an open source project, and is presented only in demo form at this point - if you want to run it you have to do so on your own servers.
So while Zimbra is not something you can immediately start using, you can view a hosted demo here and a flash demo here. The source code is available on the download page here.
Zimbra also integrates tagging of messages. It’s very impressive and quite beautiful.
Additional Reading
Solution Watch (thank for the tip, Brian), Ajaxian, batalion, Digital Hobo, Deep’s Home, Alice Hill,
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We had deployed Zimbra 4.0.3 Open Source edition on Ubuntu — everything was working fine until we upgraded to 4.0.5 and certain key parts stopped working. We tried to post to the “forums” and got no response to a pretty critical problem, so in order to fix this problem, we called Zimbra sales to inquire about getting *ANY* kind of support and $PAY$ for it since we were in a bind….
The answer we got was very very very interesting - the sales guy told me that Zimbra Open Source edition should *NOT* be run in production - only Network Edition and above. This was shocking to hear from “the leader in open source messaging and collaboration” - clearly that statement is not true. Zimbra is no better than M$ apparently. The only version they feel is “production” is the pay-for versions. And the pricing from Zimbra is worse than if we went with a hosted license from Microsoft for Hosted Exchange. So in order to get any kind of support, you fork over $$$$ to get onto the Network edition (which only runs on pay-for OS, Red Hat, SUSE, OS-X, not OS’s like Ubuntu…) The sales guy told me that open source is free, so what should I expect?
Answer: If you call yourself an open source company, I expect you to behave like one, not like - “hey, here’s a buggy free version that we won’t even begin to support you on, no matter what, and if you want a *real* version, fork over $$$ for the program and then $$$ for support and $$$ for…..”
Support at $400 an incident? over and above what you have to pay for the network edition/hosted edition? and you don’t have a choice of OS you can run it on, except for proprietary OS’s? not gonna happen…. good luck guys, and anyone foolish enough to run the open source edition since you are walking a tight-rope with no net….
asdferrty started a thread on the Zimbra forum at 01-11-2007, 05:26 AM, by 01-11-2007, 12:06 PM his problem had been solved:
http://www.zimbra.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6187
You will note by the postings on the thread that Zimbra employees got engaged and helped resolve the issue (Post #16 & #17). I would like to add that the person who solved the issue (Bobby) actually works for Zimbra support.
When I first saw Zimbra a few years back, I must say I was quite impressed. However, I didn’t pursue an open source implementation simply because there was no clearcut data as to what the server requirements are.
Fast forward a few years, and it is still ambiguous. I guess Zimbra will have to wait. The demo sure looks good though.