You compared the paid version of Zimbra to Scalix and the Windows based crap, but never even bothered to compare it the Open Source version.
Because your Micro$haft bias would really show?
Hurts doesn't it.
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There is an excellent reason why I do not compare the OSS version of Zimbra to Exchange, and that is due to the fact that most enterprises want a support contract. I may also add, you fail to see the *advantage* that my comparison gives Zimbra. While the cost comparison suffers, the feature comparison greatly benefits. The top-of-the-line paid Zimbra offering is closest to Exchange in feature set, and exceeds it in many ways, as the article makes quite clear.
J.Ja
J.Ja
Unfortunately TechRepublic's comparison on costs of Microsoft Exchange versus Zimbra collaborative suite is severely flawed by the tools used and some very bad assumptions made about ongoing "real world" costs for maintenance and updates/fixes for Microsoft Exchange.
On first point, TechRepublic should have "fairly" done Zimbra installation on CentOS 4/5, which is, if organization is unaware, a "carbon copy" Free! version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, and thus enables use of RedHat documentation and procedures.
For maintenance costs, etc., several Microsoft Gold Partners have indicated that the TechRepublic costs analysis for Exchange are a dream with no connection to reality, and therefore misleading (and possibly disengenuous
purposefully) to reading public.
I feel therefore that whole comparison becomes a sham and FUD exercise on behalf of those in company who are Microsoft shills.
On first point, TechRepublic should have "fairly" done Zimbra installation on CentOS 4/5, which is, if organization is unaware, a "carbon copy" Free! version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, and thus enables use of RedHat documentation and procedures.
For maintenance costs, etc., several Microsoft Gold Partners have indicated that the TechRepublic costs analysis for Exchange are a dream with no connection to reality, and therefore misleading (and possibly disengenuous
purposefully) to reading public.
I feel therefore that whole comparison becomes a sham and FUD exercise on behalf of those in company who are Microsoft shills.
I run a Zimbra server for 1000 students in four school districts because I didn't want them on our Exchange server. ($$, even for education).
We have Exchange for various reasons, none of them mine. But, it works well and it doesn't cost us too much because only the teachers use it.
I installed Zimbra on Ubuntu, and found similar _small_ installation issues because I didn't use RedHat. Other than that, I find more than adequate support in the user forums, and it has worked well for more than a year.
I find it interesting that TR assumes that Linux server administrators are similar to MS server administrators. Almost any yahoo can manage a MS Anyting Server, with all it's bells and alerts and GUI tools and thousands of settings and options right in your face. What should be discussed is that the Zimbra server is much harder for an inexperienced admin to break, since there are fewer options presented in the management console. How many of you have fixed Exchange problems when an administrator turned off a vague option six levels down 'just because they didn't think it was necessary'? The Zimbra options are all fairly self explanatory, AV on or off, IMAP on or off, etc.
It takes more understanding of how computers, servers, e-mail, and the Internet in general work to run a Linux server. I had a driver issue, a module version issue, and still got Zimra up and running, and I didn't think any less of the product because of my installation issues.
Base your comparison on how well it runs next time, not because you ignored suggested practices and had problems. You might also try installing Exchange on a P4 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, 50GB user space, for 1000 clients. (My installation is still free...)
We have Exchange for various reasons, none of them mine. But, it works well and it doesn't cost us too much because only the teachers use it.
I installed Zimbra on Ubuntu, and found similar _small_ installation issues because I didn't use RedHat. Other than that, I find more than adequate support in the user forums, and it has worked well for more than a year.
I find it interesting that TR assumes that Linux server administrators are similar to MS server administrators. Almost any yahoo can manage a MS Anyting Server, with all it's bells and alerts and GUI tools and thousands of settings and options right in your face. What should be discussed is that the Zimbra server is much harder for an inexperienced admin to break, since there are fewer options presented in the management console. How many of you have fixed Exchange problems when an administrator turned off a vague option six levels down 'just because they didn't think it was necessary'? The Zimbra options are all fairly self explanatory, AV on or off, IMAP on or off, etc.
It takes more understanding of how computers, servers, e-mail, and the Internet in general work to run a Linux server. I had a driver issue, a module version issue, and still got Zimra up and running, and I didn't think any less of the product because of my installation issues.
Base your comparison on how well it runs next time, not because you ignored suggested practices and had problems. You might also try installing Exchange on a P4 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, 50GB user space, for 1000 clients. (My installation is still free...)
You make a very astute point about the comparison of Windows and *Nix admins. That is one thing that I tried to make very clear in my conclusion. I think Zimbra is a good option if you are already a *Nix shop. I think a Windows shop should think very carefully before making the leap. Very often, dropping a few *Nix boxes into a Windows environment can be a real mess, unless at least one of the sys admins happens to be experienced with *Nix.
I may also add, the article was very clear on some of the points you made. I did get help through the forums, and it was accurate. I also gave very minimal dings to Zimbra over the installation. The system specs that you quote for Exhange are also below what Zimbra recommends too. A full performance comparison would be great, but sadly I am not equipped to replicate a 1,000 user environment.
J.Ja
I may also add, the article was very clear on some of the points you made. I did get help through the forums, and it was accurate. I also gave very minimal dings to Zimbra over the installation. The system specs that you quote for Exhange are also below what Zimbra recommends too. A full performance comparison would be great, but sadly I am not equipped to replicate a 1,000 user environment.
J.Ja
I posted a response to another commenter about factoring in upgrade costs. I suggest that you carefully re-read the section in the article regarding costs. I have made it quite clear why pricing in Exchange upgrades is impossible to do reliably.
I must also add, Zimbra is not, I repeat, NOT supported on CentOS. Period. Furthermore, most enterprises would rather pay for the OS support costs rather than go with an unsupported OS. I have never worked at a place that chose to not get the supported versions of F/OSS software.
Regarding my cost numbers for Exchange, I suggest that you call Microsoft and ask them what their list price is on Exchange, the CALs, and Windows Server. That is where I got those numbers. If there is a "disagreement with reality", the disagreement is that no one pays nearly close to list price, a huge number of vendors sell those licenses for far less than list price. Finally, while the OS costs do play a factor in the pricing, it is an increasingly small factor in the pricing as the number of users rise. For a 1,000 person company, a RHEL or SLES support contract is less than they spend on office supplies in a month.
Beleive me, I am no "Microsoft shill". I think that I gave Zimbra a fairly fair shake. Indeed, I spent many hours discussing the product with the Zimbra team over the phone and through email, to ensure that I had my facts right. They even looked at the price comparison before I finalized it. I write quite a bit about non-Microsoft technologies, quite favorably when warranted (see my review of PC-BSD, or read my blog here at TechRepublic).
J.Ja
I must also add, Zimbra is not, I repeat, NOT supported on CentOS. Period. Furthermore, most enterprises would rather pay for the OS support costs rather than go with an unsupported OS. I have never worked at a place that chose to not get the supported versions of F/OSS software.
Regarding my cost numbers for Exchange, I suggest that you call Microsoft and ask them what their list price is on Exchange, the CALs, and Windows Server. That is where I got those numbers. If there is a "disagreement with reality", the disagreement is that no one pays nearly close to list price, a huge number of vendors sell those licenses for far less than list price. Finally, while the OS costs do play a factor in the pricing, it is an increasingly small factor in the pricing as the number of users rise. For a 1,000 person company, a RHEL or SLES support contract is less than they spend on office supplies in a month.
Beleive me, I am no "Microsoft shill". I think that I gave Zimbra a fairly fair shake. Indeed, I spent many hours discussing the product with the Zimbra team over the phone and through email, to ensure that I had my facts right. They even looked at the price comparison before I finalized it. I write quite a bit about non-Microsoft technologies, quite favorably when warranted (see my review of PC-BSD, or read my blog here at TechRepublic).
J.Ja
What about upgrade costs?
I assume that in 5 years you will upgrade Exchange to the next available version. With Zimbra, this cost is built into the price. Not so Exchange, unless you buy SA, which would make the MS costs higher in the above chart. So a five year cost for Exchange should be doubled in the above chart, IMHO.
I assume that in 5 years you will upgrade Exchange to the next available version. With Zimbra, this cost is built into the price. Not so Exchange, unless you buy SA, which would make the MS costs higher in the above chart. So a five year cost for Exchange should be doubled in the above chart, IMHO.
I agree with you on that, and the article and chart make that extremely, EXTREMELY clear that Exchange's upgrade costs can completely change the cost comparison. That being said, it is impossible to put those costs into a price comparison, because no one has no idea when the next upgrade cycle will be or how much it will cost. We can only put current, known costs. If you also look at the numbers, I used "list price" not "street price". It takes less than 5 minutes to find Windows Server, Exchange, and Exchange CALs at a substantially lower price than what I quote because there are dozens of resellers that sell them less than list price. Not so with the RHEL, SUSE, or Zimbra licenses and support contracts. Those only sell from one price, through the vendor. Also note that all of those vendors (including Microsoft) almost universally grant pricing breaks to nearly everyone. But it is impossible to factor in those price breaks since they vary so much from customer to customer.
So while I agree that the costs are highly variable, it is the only truly even, fair price comparison that can be made, is to use list price and to factor out upgrade costs.
J.Ja
So while I agree that the costs are highly variable, it is the only truly even, fair price comparison that can be made, is to use list price and to factor out upgrade costs.
J.Ja
Have tested Zimbra, and although we use Linux on most of our servers, we are still running MS Exchange due to all the features.
I will say, Zimbra hits the 80/20 rule of Exchange's features pretty well. But if you are used to Exchange's feature set (particularly in conjunction with Outlook), then Zimbra does not have perfect parity, and depending on what your needs are, that can indeed knock it out of the running.
J.Ja
J.Ja
Try DeskNow it has some of the features you show missing here, like public folders, and even has message boards. Plus it's a LOT cheaper.
Thanks for the suggestion! I am always interested in trying out new email systems and sharing what I've learned through the reviews.
Thanks again!
J.Ja
Thanks again!
J.Ja
A product with a much smaller community which is not mentioned in this article is Zarafa. This product has a very good and stable Outlook integration. Features like freebusy, resources and wizard rules work out of the box. The installation is very easy, you can just use your default Linux MTA and own AV and Antispam configuration.
I installed a system on my existing Ubuntu server in only 30 minutes.
There are lots of documentation available on the website www.zarafa.com.
The Zimbra webclient is really great, but the Zarafa webaccess is also AJAX and gets more and more advanced features.
I installed a system on my existing Ubuntu server in only 30 minutes.
There are lots of documentation available on the website www.zarafa.com.
The Zimbra webclient is really great, but the Zarafa webaccess is also AJAX and gets more and more advanced features.
There's no mention of Zimbra's Archiving and Discovery here, an option that highly differentiates Zimbra to organizations like many, that need to retain email due to SOX requirements.
Zimbra hosting providers like 01.com and a list of others available from the partner's pages come in between $5 or $6 per month per mailbox, and have the capacity to hold much more mail than can usually be managed by Outlook alone, as well as sending larger attachments. The other nice thing about using a hosting provider is the points this article makes about running the software become less relevant, when that's someone else's job...
Zimbra hosting providers like 01.com and a list of others available from the partner's pages come in between $5 or $6 per month per mailbox, and have the capacity to hold much more mail than can usually be managed by Outlook alone, as well as sending larger attachments. The other nice thing about using a hosting provider is the points this article makes about running the software become less relevant, when that's someone else's job...
Yes, those are features which I did not get into in the article, but they are indeed there. Zimbra is a good choice for people who need to maintain archives of email without necessarily having it only on tape, or to have a huge amount of storage directly online and live.
In terms of cheap hosting; frankly, I think most customers really do not care what is providing SMTP and POP3 access, but the Web client is definitely better than a dinky Web client on top of qmail.
J.Ja
In terms of cheap hosting; frankly, I think most customers really do not care what is providing SMTP and POP3 access, but the Web client is definitely better than a dinky Web client on top of qmail.
J.Ja
I wanted to post an update to this article having just tested the community edition of Zimbra 5.0.5 on a vanilla/OOTB RHEL 4 ES install. The RHEL install was so easy, that I almost didn't believe it was happening - I guess I was expecting some issues based on your OpenSuSE experience. I unpacked the .tgz file and just ran the install.sh script and the installer did the rest.
The only thing that it complained about was that I hadn't set up my MX record in DNS (oops). I had sendmail running on the box (just a test box with no special configuration) and that broke postfix until I stopped sendmail and (re)started postfix (that took only minimal effort to figure out how to do). The hardest thing for me was figuring out how to change the mode of the server from http to https once I had my certificate installed (has to be done through the command line).
Beyond that, it just worked. It seems very responsive and stable. We've been using Horde for our webmail (no one at our company really likes it enough to use it full time) and this is definitely an improvement with respect to look and feel. Very close to OWA (which we are also evaluating to use with our Blackberries) in form and functionality. I am hoping that it will work with the Blackberry devices as well because I am not excited about moving to Exchange - we've been a Sendmail/UW IMAP/Qpopper shop for over 10 years with extreme success and happiness. It just works. I use pine for my email and I can count on one hand (or less) the number of times it has crashed on me since 1992.
At any rate, I thought I would throw this out there.
Slightly off-topic, I must say that I am amazed at how polite you (Justin) are able to remain when the trolls throw out their flames. It's refreshing to see that you can keep your discussion on topic without getting dragged into the crap. I am no Micro$oft fan (and also started out on SunOS playing MUDs back in the early 90s), but sometimes they do provide the best solution for everyday users whether I like it or not. I just try not to get too bent out of shape over it. Seems like you do the same. =)
The only thing that it complained about was that I hadn't set up my MX record in DNS (oops). I had sendmail running on the box (just a test box with no special configuration) and that broke postfix until I stopped sendmail and (re)started postfix (that took only minimal effort to figure out how to do). The hardest thing for me was figuring out how to change the mode of the server from http to https once I had my certificate installed (has to be done through the command line).
Beyond that, it just worked. It seems very responsive and stable. We've been using Horde for our webmail (no one at our company really likes it enough to use it full time) and this is definitely an improvement with respect to look and feel. Very close to OWA (which we are also evaluating to use with our Blackberries) in form and functionality. I am hoping that it will work with the Blackberry devices as well because I am not excited about moving to Exchange - we've been a Sendmail/UW IMAP/Qpopper shop for over 10 years with extreme success and happiness. It just works. I use pine for my email and I can count on one hand (or less) the number of times it has crashed on me since 1992.
At any rate, I thought I would throw this out there.
Slightly off-topic, I must say that I am amazed at how polite you (Justin) are able to remain when the trolls throw out their flames. It's refreshing to see that you can keep your discussion on topic without getting dragged into the crap. I am no Micro$oft fan (and also started out on SunOS playing MUDs back in the early 90s), but sometimes they do provide the best solution for everyday users whether I like it or not. I just try not to get too bent out of shape over it. Seems like you do the same. =)
Jon -
Thanks for the update! I do think Zimbra is a good choice for people who don't mind leaving Exchange. As someone who's been dealing with the daemontools/qmail combo for many years now, I wish Zimbra was supported on FreeBSD!
And thank you too for the compliment! At the end of the day, I just have to remind myself that what I use is what I use, what you use is what you use, and we all have our reasons for it, even if those reasons might not match the experience of others.
Have a great day, and thanks again for the "mini-review"!
J.Ja
Thanks for the update! I do think Zimbra is a good choice for people who don't mind leaving Exchange. As someone who's been dealing with the daemontools/qmail combo for many years now, I wish Zimbra was supported on FreeBSD!
And thank you too for the compliment! At the end of the day, I just have to remind myself that what I use is what I use, what you use is what you use, and we all have our reasons for it, even if those reasons might not match the experience of others.
Have a great day, and thanks again for the "mini-review"!
J.Ja
Jon
Thanks for the update on Zimbra 5.05. I just wanted to
add that any costs comparison naturally favors Exchange
since the costs for Exchange remains the same
throughout the 3 or 5 year comparison period.
That's not quite fair considering Exchange's greater
complexity, higher server requirements, less efficient file
system which needs optimization every so often, yearly
AV/Anti-spam server licenses you have to fork out for
since AV/Anti-spam is not integrated compared with
Zimbra and Scalix. For users who have a mixture of
Outlook clients and just Web clients, they will realize
further savings in not having to purchase Outlook client
licenses as well.
So for me, I would take a closer look at Zimbra vs Scalix
and it's a toss up depending on your preferences.
Thanks for the update on Zimbra 5.05. I just wanted to
add that any costs comparison naturally favors Exchange
since the costs for Exchange remains the same
throughout the 3 or 5 year comparison period.
That's not quite fair considering Exchange's greater
complexity, higher server requirements, less efficient file
system which needs optimization every so often, yearly
AV/Anti-spam server licenses you have to fork out for
since AV/Anti-spam is not integrated compared with
Zimbra and Scalix. For users who have a mixture of
Outlook clients and just Web clients, they will realize
further savings in not having to purchase Outlook client
licenses as well.
So for me, I would take a closer look at Zimbra vs Scalix
and it's a toss up depending on your preferences.
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