Zimbra - Yay or Nay?

[ThePsychoHobbit]

My boss is looking for some kind of calendaring/collaborative software for our company (under 10 people in the company). The one he likes is Zimbra. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Zimbra, from what little I've seen of it. Therefore, I thought I'd ask everyone here for their thoughts, and possibly change my mind.

So there's the question - what's your opinion of Zimbra? Why is it great? Why is it horrible? I'm not interested in OS-specific issues (e.g. getting Zimbra running in Gentoo), but rather interested in comments on the Zimbra package itself.

[shigeo]

quite exactly one year ago, i worked at my university during my semester break. my job was to help the sysadmin out in migrating the old mailserver to a new zimbra server (sysadmin decided that it would be zimbra). i spent a week testing the server and writing howtos and manuals for the staff about the migration.

zimbra had a few bugs back then, but the developer-forums and release candidates seemed quite promising.
the bugs were no big deal, mainly functionality things (for example, the zimbra ajax UI had feature-magic where you could mark calendar dates by draging a mail and dropping it on the calendar. if you had 100 people to inform about a date, then everybody will drag-n-drop and, conclusively, 100*100 fyi-mails would be sent. i really believe that such naughty behaviour is now remodeled).


all in all, i thought that the ajax UI did't seem so bad. there also is a thunderbird plugin (zimbra connector, i believe), with whom you can sync your zimbra and thunderbird. google-search for "evolution" and "zimbra" shows, that there is a connector for evolution, too. the zimbra forum is quite active, and the user base seems ever growing.
i don't know about any iphone/blackberry/gmail/outlook/any-other-mumbo-jumbo sync tool. may you should check those out.

i just remember being happy that our sysadmin didn't want to pollute our *nix environment with M$ exchange, and gave M$ the cold shoulder.

cheer up, zimbra isn't that bad.


PS: zimbra installation worked like a charm. the zimbra developers are very serious about installation. zimbra is as generic and modular as possible, being testet with lots of different unices and is quite independent from any specific distro-voodoo.