Webmail in the educational market appears to be a three horse race between Zimbra, Gmail and Outlook/Microsoft Exchange. And today, Yahoo’s Zimbra won out against the other two in a bid to provide for Stanford University.
This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in “.edu”.
We hear the contest to sign Stanford was particularly heated, and in the end, Google had less luck than when it won the chance to conduct the biggest deployment of Gmail to date across Australian schools.
Zimbra may have won out at Stanford for its particularly strong mobile support (with ActiveSync), as well as its synchronization and administrative functionality. It also boasts certain enterprise-friendly features that Gmail has yet to offer.
More information about this roll out can be found on Stanford Report.
A nice victory for the commercial open source model. Congrats Zimbra!
Link to Stanford Report article is broken: http://news-service.stanford.e.....70908.html
go Zimbra!
from the Zimbra website: “There’s no more 2 gigabyte mailbox limits (sorry Outlook)”
sorry Zimbra, outlook has a 20gb limit. I’m getting really sick of false advertising in the tech world.
I would infinitely rather have Google… Zimbra has its points, but for ease of use Google can’t be beat.
Nathan, ever tried to open a 20Gb mailbox in Outlook?
I hope they actually tried Zimbra before signing off…
yeh zimbrafan - it works fine. the search in 2007 is really fast too.
How about Pine Mail? Worked great when I was at Stanford.
Stanford will be in for a surprise when they try the integration with Blackberry and Salesforce… which basically don’t work.
What does the future look like for the commercial arm of Zimbra if a Microsoft / Yahoo! merger becomes reality?
Zimbra is a great product but I am amazed anyone would sink dollars into them now that they are owned by Yahoo. Is there any doubt if MS buys Yahoo they will roll it into Exchange and shut it down?
Nathan: Even .pst’s?
Zimbra is a very good collaboration tool as opposed to just email. Yahoo is a negative factor in choosing it, but I think if evaluated only based on product stability, and features Zimbra wins hands down.
Yahoo’s email is way slower than Gmail and you can’t compare much with outlook anyways. I would think the same for Zimbra also. It has to be slow.
Sounds like to me there are many comments here from peeps not yet familiar with the latest version of Zimbra. Zimbra 5 in Firefox 3 or Safari 3 is quite fast, I login in about 1 second even when traveling in Europe although 01.com is in the US. As far as BES, I’m in the free public beta of native BES support with Zimbra, and it seems to work just as well as my past experience with Exchange (I’m happy to leave Outlook behind, although some of my team mates still use it with Zimbra). As far as Google Apps goes, it feels like a web-app. Zimbra feels like a desktop application. As far as Salesforce goes, I don’t understand why anyone would want to use it, never understood the point of any integration efforts there with Zimbra, which seems like a serious counterpoint to the highly commercial Salesforce thing.
@EH: yes - ever since office 2003
@Nathan: are you talking about a mailbox on Exchange ? Outlook is irrelevant, almost. This is stamford: students using firefox, safari, thunderbird, Entourage for OSX (gasp!). None of these work well with Exchange. Sure, they can download imap/pop and send over SMTP. But i can do that (very well) with opensource *nix mailservers that are already out there. Also, your 20GB practical limit is useless. Outlook’s bigger limitation is problems with > 5000 items in a folder and that’s what trips people up since they usually don’t organize their data - this holds for 2007 as well. Finally, when dealing in a large enterprise scenario, the user with 20GB is nothing but problems: you’ll waste a ton of resources isolating this user to practically his/her own server. And what about when they have to resync to offline outlook ? And remember, if outlook isn’t offline, Windows search kills the server. Nathan, it sounds like you have no practical experience with Exchange in the enterprise.
@Everyone: the viability of the Zimbra product in the face of all the yahoo upheaval is a concern; however, stamford is a special place with immense developer resources. undoubtedly, they will have special access to _all_ the code (that’s right, the topdog features in this product arent opensource) and that’s probably one of the reasons they went with Zimbra in the first place: control of their own destiny.
I believe the story missed the driving factor. How much have Sergey and Larry donated to Stanford. It’s all about business.
Feb. 16, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang will donate $75 million to Stanford University, his alma mater and the place where he and a fellow student began working on a directory of Web sites………..
Is Stamford in Stamford?
I’m from Texas A&M and the reason we chose zimbra was because in gmail the data is hosted on google servers and outlook is too expensive.
The real reason why Stanford chose Zimbra over Gmail is the guy name Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer who is the core member of Zimbra team. He was instrumental in setting OpenLDAP server at Stanford.
Gmail is better than Zimbra.
http://www.openldap.org/lists/.....00176.html
http://www.stanford.edu/servic.....nldap.html
That’s it!
Ummmmmm, what happens if Microsoft buys a chunk or all of Yahoo? Zimbra may wind up a footnote in history. Not a good position to be in.
@lee hearts: Until Gmail gets perfect, Google can be beat.
Michael,
Not entirely accurate about Penn. As a student, I can tell you that we have a ridiculous number of mail systems. As of last year, the College of Arts and Sciences uses Microsoft’s Windows Live, and the Wharton School uses Outlook/Exchange. Zimbra I think is used for email addresses for the administration, not for students, and not for all the employees of Penn, either.
Crap…Mark, not Michael. Sorry.
Why did this happen?
1) Zimbra is a better product for enterprise solutions.
2) Stanford University is one the original investors in Redpoint Ventures. Redpoint has invested in Zimbra.
We do not use Zimbra as the mail system at the University of Wisconsin. Maybe smaller groups in the University do, but it’s certainly not what the main mail system uses.
surprising Gmail hasn’t yet provided an option to keep email on own servers.
They went with a vendor that is on the verge of either bankruptcy or hostile takeover? Isn’t that the business equivalent of running with scissors? We’ll have to see what happens in August…
I totally disagree with
“Webmail in the educational market appears to be a three horse race between Zimbra, Gmail and Outlook/Microsoft Exchange”
There are plenty of other open-source solutions which are used by Universities for Webmail, and certainly not just Zimbra.
Atmail - http://atmail.com/ is another solution which seems to be actively used in University circles, just without the PR hype/buzz like Zimbra.
@techmine - zimbra uses a lot of ajax calls therefore the whole page doesn’t have to reload again which makes it quite nice for a browser based email/collaboration system.
I’ve gone from hotmail -> yahoo -> google
now finally using Google(personal) / Zimbra (work)
With zimbra we have control over the backend. With a little digging through the code of course. If you understand ajax calls you could create some slick zimlets.
You guys that are worried about Microsoft buying Yahoo and shutting down Zimbra missed an important point:
The core of Zimbra is Open Source. If they take it offline tomorrow, someone can re-release the current version under a different name. If they change the license, someone will fork it. Regardless of who owns Zimbra the company, the source code will live on, as long as someone is willing to maintain it.