+1 (good review)

Ugliest GUI and color ever, close to M$ products + the Yahoo pub all around. Think of Outlook 2007 bloat vs. Thunderbird. Minimalism is good, it helps being organized and focused. The rest is solely propaganda… cough, marketing science.

My old company used Exchange which wasn’t nearly as cool as Zimbra, plus it was expensive and always broke down. I can’t begin to say how helpful it is to have something like Zimbra which always works and something I NEVER need to give any attention to…. other than for email and its other features.

I’m trying the Zimbra Desktop wth my Yaho! Mail Plus account.

So if I understand well, there is no way for me to install and use no Zimlets from the gallery?

We are in the process of ditching Groupwise in favor of Zimbra for our ~ 10000 users. We seriously evaluated Google Apps, but rejected it for the inverse of the reasons others in this blog have liked gmail – too simple, lacks key features, no global address book, limited calendars, “labels” are not a replacement for nested folders, annoying thread-only view that can’t be turned off, etc. etc. Gmail is great for personal use and I use google apps with my personal domain, but is just not ready for corporate use. Also, we need to “own” all our mail on our servers, something that is not possible with gmail.

We will implement about 10 TB of storage via a SAN. The Zinbra MailDir flat storage format will be sweet – I’m in the middle of yet another meltdown of the GW databse and have 3000 users ready to burn me at the stake while we rebuild their post office. Novell has off-shored all GW tech support to Mumbai, and while I like the Indians on a personal level, they are not as skilled as the old guys in Provo.

The whole project, including moving from Novell IDM to Velo and all the “Sarb-Ox” compliant archiving, will cost about $200K to launch and ~ $100Kper year.

Happiness will be GW in my rear view mirror!

Steve

As far as I’m concerned, Gmail is THE solution for simple, no frills, web-based e-mail. You may have a complaint here or there about features that could work more effectively, but I highly doubt that a “major overhaul’ is required to improve said features.

As far as Zimbra goes — it’s interesting, I guess. But definitely not for me. I think the fact that it has so many features I wouldn’t use very often is the main drawback.

Zimbra looks nice and whilst you might pick gmail over it be thankful you have such a nice system to use at uni.

It does include the mobile interface, but I have it set up as a standard account on my iphone and I really like having my “real” imap folders back (subfolders of inbox, etc.) that I didn’t have on gmail. The only things that don’t seem to be included in the Open Source Edition are the desktop connectors (Outlook and iSync) – but I managed to get all of my contacts synced between my osx address book and Zimbra using plaxo and a little black magic.

Also, the GaTech implementation leaves out the calendar, documents, and “briefcase” features – I was really sorry to see this as these are all also really well done. There is also a “Yahoo” theme that isn’t there in the GaTech version, unfortunate as it is the cleanest and newest-looking of the themes in the OSE.

If you want to get your email off of a hosted provider, setting up Zimbra on your own server (or a vmware instance) is not so hard – and I’d say it’s definitely worth it!

Do you know how Zimbra fares when faced with very large Inboxes, performance-wise?