Comcast Goes to Zimbra 143
tenchiken writes "Zimbra, an Open Source enterprise messaging app, just scored a major win. Comcast will be moving mail services to Zimbra for all of their customers. Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in. Add in support for Samba Domain Controllers and Linux Authentication, Offline Access and Evolution Support and we might finally have our long desired Open Source Exchange killer."
Listen to those Talking Heads: (Score:5, Funny)
lauli lonni cadori gadjam
a bim beri glassala glandride
e glassala tuffm i zimbra
bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
blassa glallassasa zimbrabim
a bim beri glassala grandrid
e glassala tuffm i zimbra
gadji beri bimba glandridi
lauli lonni cadora gadjam
a bim beri glassasa glandrid
e glassala tuffm i zimbra
err, what? (Score:5, Funny)
there ARE areas in life where you should NEVER EVER mix this one up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I certainly hope ... (Score:1)
Try Scalix. (Score:2)
But, if you want to have something that actually embodies the few good features of Exchange without having to accept the fundamentally bad design and poor scalability, you should probably look at scalix [scalix.com].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I fully real
Re: (Score:2)
$ grep LICENSE
LICENSE="GPL-2"
Comcast (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of how bulletproof, flawless or otherwise outstanding Zimbra may be, Comcast will likely screw up the implementation in such a way as to reflect badly on Zimbra and ostracize even more of their customers in the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Cheers.
Oh my aching grammar! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Recursive grammar fixing (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to be challenging Microsoft in an area dominated by Exchange.
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
"...area that Exchange has been dominated in." means Exchange is losing
"...area that Exchange has dominated in." means Exchange is winning
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Original:
Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in.
Fixed:
Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to be challenging Microsoft in an area that Exchange has dominated.
I'm not so sure about this. The last I looked at the numbers, Exchange had about 40% of the total e-mail server market, and only a tiny fraction of the commercial e-mail service to end user market; seeing as Exchange's stronghold has been within medium and large business operations. Maybe the original was more correct than your version.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:4, Informative)
I am trying to get them to allow you to disable the automatic event notification emails that go out to people you put on the events (this is really annoying when you want to do these notifications yourself).
Re: (Score:2)
Basic Client now available... (Score:2)
We've been using Zimbra for over a year now and I'm totally blown away by how much the system is continually improved upon. The Basic Client is a terrific example of how Zimbra user's needs are being gauged and met by the organization. Outstanding!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:4, Insightful)
minimum memory: 2G
recommended memory: 4G.
That's for a box dedicated to being a mail server and webmail/calendaring client (forget about sharing it with other hosting needs, like a Webserver).
For a company (small or whatever), having a dedicated box for this sort of thing is reasonable and expected... and, please forgive the pun, the suite looks sweet. 8)
But, as an individual/uber-small hoster, those requirements put it outside the range of "host this on an old box."
That's not to say that Zimbra was targeted at me to start (so, please don't take it as a complaint). I just wanted to break the news (hopefully gently) to those hobbyists that were getting excited about hosting it. 8/
Re: (Score:2)
Their testing environment specs are much easier to attain (1G ram, 1.5 gHz machine, RAM is cheap enough that even your "old box server" should have a gig.) If you just want to do something like this in a small environment, a reasonably new old box with $100 of memory should do the trick.
Re:Anyone here have any experiances with Zimbra? (Score:4, Informative)
I just recently put together a Zimbra server for my company. We'll move it to a better machine (with a SCSI RAID5 Array) later, but I built it on an old machine just to make sure Zimbra was what we were looking for in a new mail server to replace our Red Hat w/Sendmail box (and boy, is it ever!).
The machine I'm running it on is an 800MHz Duron with 1.0 GB of RAM and two 40GB IDE drives. It's running an unmodified Ubuntu Dapper Drake "Desktop" install.
Besides Zimbra, the only services I've added to the box are VNCServer and BIND.
This server supports mail and calendering for about 15 employees, including a helpdesk used by our outside clients.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Full system recovery is a little rocky, but is being adressed.
My favorite
Why'd comcast change? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, though, I'd be interested to see Comcast's reasoning on changing to Zimbra from Exchange -- might make it a lot easier to justify similar changes elsewhere.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I very seriously doubt that comcast is switching from exchange. The article does not say. They are probably switching from sendmail + some webmail app to Zimbra.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
This is for the customer facing email, which as I recall is pretty standard SMTP stuff, internal systems will still run Exchange.
As far as "why this package", I couldn't tell you. I wasn't in on those discussions.
Yes, I work for Comcast.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you know if AT&T was still using InterMail (from Openwave) to service the email? If so, that's interesting to me, since Zimbra was started by ex-openwave people, though no one I met when I worked there.
Re: (Score:2)
There must be something huge in this that Exchange can not do or meet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There must be something huge in this that Exchange can not do or meet.
Maybe you're barking up the wrong tree completely. Do you actually think Comcast is using Exchange to supply mail service to all their customers? I'm one of those customers and I know they instructed me to use POP/IMAP for the protocols. I can't even imagine trying to scale an Exchange server up to that number of users. Maybe it is possible, but it seems highly unlikely.
I strongly suspect Comcast is migrating from Sendmail or some other common e-mail server that is built to scale well. I don't know wher
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly because I worked there for 7 years is where it came from.
That's interesting. Another person (AC) posting in this thread claims to work at Comcast and says they're using Exchange internally, for employees, but currently have a different closed solution to host e-mail accounts for customers.
Exchange can scale that far for POP/IMAP and small email accounts, and it does so fairly well.
How far is that, exactly? How many in use e-mail accounts does Comcast support? Most people I know, even non-technical people, ignore their ISP provided account in favor of one of the popular and portable Web mail solutions. I'm just curious how far Comcast has managed to s
Not completely Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The open vesion is fairly feature rich but misses some minor stuff. At my new company we might actually just use the OS one for a while since there's only 5 of us and I can figure out the backup/restore procedures myself (dump the database/ldap a
Re:Not completely Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Looking at the comparison between the open source version, and the commercial versions, much of the functionality that exchange excells in (namely corperate enterprise messeging), is not available in the OS version.
It's worse than that - the Open Source license is "Attribware". Basically any fork must have large obnoxious ads linking back to the Zimbra website. This is a huge disincentive for anyone who wants to fork the project. If a project is stagnating or the company owning a project goes belly up the right to fork without caveats is critical.
I'm not worried though... There are a lot of promising and less restricted open source projects are in the works (Kolab, OpenGroupWare, Citadel etc...). Most
Exchange compatibility NOT free / opensource (Score:2, Informative)
Choices (Score:5, Informative)
Now having just said this, Scalix is a pig! It' is unstable, uses A very clunky hack of Tomcat, has no backup or restore functionaility, the Outlook connector is missing key features that Outlook/Exchange users live by, and an incident-based support pricing model that, quite frankly, is a racket. (I know packethead, tell us what you really think).
I sincerly hope Zimbra has gotten more mature and can actually put a dent in M$'s dominance.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I hope they both continue to improve.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Is Dumb End User what you mean?
I would love to give it a shot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I would love to give it a shot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I would love to give it a shot (Score:4, Insightful)
They could go the easy route and have the package conflict with other MTA's (all that other stuff can just run on alternative ports). I know, I know, sounds like a great idea. Why don't I get right on that? *grumble grumble*
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And that is why I was looking at OpenGroupWare [opengroupware.org], which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem and has a (non-free) Outlook connector. I haven't tried it yet, though.
Does anyone have experience with OGW?
Re:I would love to give it a shot (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Jason
Re: (Score:2)
I assume from your posts in this thread that it will be open source but just wanted to clarify
Re:I would love to give it a shot (Score:1)
Try it with VMware... (Score:3, Informative)
I've played with it and it's basically "email server in a box"...just turn it on and point your mail app at it. I can't speak for specific features because it's been awhile now since I last checked it out.
Not a comperable move (Score:5, Insightful)
None of that has anything to do with what Exchange is aimed for. Exchange is not used for any major ISP that I'm aware of (not even Microsoft's public email services), nor should it be. Exchange is built to integrate with Domain Services. It's made so that you can have resource scheduling integrated with calendars and busy notification. It's made so that a secretary can log into her boss's account and check all his emails and send emails as herself or under his name as if he sent them himself. It's made so that when the idiot sends out the video of the latest commercial he thinks is cute that there is only one copy of the video on the server, and the emails point to it, rather than replicating it 1000 times.
Exchange is not a mail server. It is a messaging server (with integrated calendar functionality). This submission is written by someone that is either too stupid to know the difference, or who knows that the comparison is stupid and is just trying to drum up support for a product through misrepresentation. Either way, though the product being touted may be interesting, the submission is crap.
Re:Not a comparable move (Score:1)
This is correct, they were on another large hosted solution.
Re: (Score:2)
Every MX machine on every MSFT domain is an Exchange box. Maybe not Hotmail, but everything else is. The fact that it's configured as an SMTP relay doesn't mean it's not running Exchange.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And I am just going to have to conclude that you know snot and didn't RTFA, or bother looking at the links in the submission. If you did, you would notice that Zimbra is also a messaging server (with integrated calendaring functionality), that also can manage directory services and is Open Source.
Either way, the product being touted is interesting, but your comment is crap.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to conclude that you didn't read my comment. If you had, you'd have noticed that I didn't say a damn thing about Zimbra. What it does and does not do is irrelevant to my point. An ISP mail server is
It's nice.. (Score:1)
Compared to Exchange on a Select agreement, or hosted Exchange, it's not bad at all. For
Open source NOVL killer (Score:2)
More like an open source Groupwise killer. Later on Novell. Wonder if Red Hat is going to be purchasing another company soon
Nice Slashvertisement! (Score:2, Informative)
zimbra kills nothing (Score:1)
it's extremely peculiar to install,
it doesn't reside well with others,
it crashes and refuses to start for no apparent reason,
it has way to many log files to be troubleshoot,
it eats memory for breakfast,
it doesn't support installs in a custom directory.
it's their way or the highway.
Zimbra support is next to useless.
comcast is a bunch of morons for trying to use this as an enterprise suite.
it will work well with dedicated servers and dedicated staf
I've really wanted to play with this (Score:2)
I'd agree that it's Enterprise Ready, having seen a couple admin friends roll it out to their enterprise, seems pretty sweet. Their licensing model looks pretty sane too. Full functionality in the OSS version, then pay extra for all the Exchange/Outlook integration features, hopefully that brings in enough cash to keep development going
Really has Linux Autentication? (Score:2)
Can anyone clarify this?
http://www.zimbra.com/docs/ne/latest/administratio n_guide/5_Zimbra_LDAP.5.1.html#1036410 [zimbra.com]
-matthew
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
-matthew
Re: (Score:2)
Go to www.zimbra.com/forums and use the search function.
Yawn (Score:2)
Hula? (Score:2)
From what I know its still opensource and could be taken up by people but there just dosnt seem to be intrest in it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I do believe that Zimbra includes a SyncML server, which should enable you to sync your calendar/events/contacts from anywhere you can reach the server over the internet. I have seen great SyncML clients from Synthesis, and there are several free-beer and/or free-speech syncML clients for PDA's out there..
Re: (Score:2)
No, it doesn't
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Now, my own personal experience with the PST importer, after having used it for several individuals, is that it works very well. It takes a while to import someone's 800 megabyte PST file over a T1 connection, but that's hardly worth complaining about.
As for the missing features that one would get with MS Exchange, there are a few. Most notably is Task support,
Re: (Score:2)