[plug] Zimbra

[Brad Campbell]

On 04/05/11 18:12, Tim Bowden wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 17:23 +0800, Brad Campbell wrote:
>>
>> The real clanger with Zimbra is it is a complete pain to install and
>> cleanly integrate into an already configured server. It wants a clean
>> server of one of a very small list of approved operating systems.
>>
> That's getting less painful.  All it takes is a fresh virtual server all
> of its own.  Not so hard any more with kvm.  CPU cycles are cheap enough
> for small operations.

Which is precisely what I have done. It's incredible how much you can wring out of a commodity 6 
core processor and 16GB of ram. It also makes it easy to automate backups. Send the VM an ACPI 
shutdown, back up the file and start it back up.

I've been doing some pretty large layered work with GIMP (designed to be printed at 300DPI A1) and 
it's much nicer to do that on a VM in the server tunnelling X over ssh than it is on a Mac Mini with 
only 2GB of RAM. When you can fire up a VM with 4 cores and 12GB of ram it makes things much quicker.

>> Because (A) it's expensive, and (B) it has a limited license count I
>> only want to use it for a limited number of e-mail accounts. I've got it
>> set up behind an existing Exim mail server that runs most of the domain
>> and only passes through the mail for the mobile accounts.
>>
>> Chris is right though, the Exchange Connector and the mobile syncing
>> features are only available in the commercial version.
>>
>> Having said that did I mention it syncs with my blackberry? That alone
>> is worth the price of admission for me.
>>
>> I've lost count of the money I've *cough* against the wall in the last
>> 10 years alone buying phones and trying to get them to do this.
> I've not tried mobile sync.  At lest there's still IMAP for mail.
> Surely that works fine for mobile?  Is there really no calendar sync for
> mobile?  Some strange unknown formats at play?
No, I'm pretty sure you can use CalDAV without the mobile connector, though I can't get that to work 
on Pam's iPhone. The ActiveSync works, but I just can't get CalDAV to see my shared calendars. It's 
all flawless on the BB through the BESX though.

I played with a few IMAP clients on various phones and there are some pretty good ones out there. I 
was using an IMAP client on the BB for a while connecting to Dovecot, and the IDLE support worked 
really well. Bandwidth was low and it was pretty quick.

> I don't mind the simple backups or short downtime (few seconds with lvm
> snapshots).  If you're in an exchange free environment (ok, mostly only
> small business) lack of outlook integration is not such a big problem
> because they're probably not using the features you're missing.  Full
> outlook would be nice (the less the users desktop is messed with the
> better), but that's survivable for certain scenarios.
I'm using the Zimbra Desktop client. I have to say (java bloat and all) it's really very nice. 
Having said that, their web client is almost as good on firefox.

I've no idea what exchange costs to buy, but everyone I know that runs it reckons its damn expensive 
to keep running.