[SLL] Groupware servers

[Derek Simkowiak]

    In my experience, Zimbra is very, very slow, both on client side and 
on the server side.  I used it as my personal email server for roughly 
two years.

    On the server they run a ton of bloated Java, on the client (web 
browser "web mail") then run a ton of bloated Javascript.  I say 
"bloated" because Yahoo and Google offer similar Web 2.0 AJAX features, 
but they are much faster than Zimbra.

    I thought it was just me, but when I Googled the slowness issue, I 
found a large number of disparate mail lists and web forums where others 
reported the same problem, even on very beefy hardware.


    The sad truth is that the OSS community has completely dropped the 
ball w.r.t. an Exchange replacement.  All of the ones Kurt recommended 
do not offer a shared calendar that is integrated with email-based 
invites and resource allocation.  That's the missing feature.

    Currently at home I'm using eBox, which is very nice.  Pretty GUI, 
easy to manage users, anti-spam and anti-virus, all Open Source (Postfix 
+ Courier IMAP + ClamAV + more), but still no shared calendar w/invites.

    You may want to consider eBox (or similar) with a separate shared 
calendar application, i.e. one based on PHP or something, but it won't 
have the level of integration that Exchange has.

    There was one company that offered an Outlook "MAPI connector" 
plugin which enabled IMAP servers to send and receive meeting invites, 
but I don't recall the name... ping me if interested, I'll dig it up in 
Google.


--Derek

Mark Ballinger wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:35 PM, John Aldrich <jmaldrich at yahoo.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Thursday 11 December 2008, Kurt Buff wrote:
>>     
>>> Many...
>>>
>>> Zimbra, Zarafa, Scalix, OSER, OpenChange, Open-Xchange, and there are
>>> probably a few others
>>>
>>>       
>> Let me rephrase... :-) Any that you have experience with and would recommend?
>> I've been "playing" with linux for the past few years (starting with RH5, I
>> think it was) but I'm not sure I could admin a production machine. :-)
>>     
>
> I installed Zimbra at an exchange-replacement site, and they moved on
> to Groupwise.  I then installed Zimbra as a dovecot/squirrelmail
> replacement, and they later moved to Exchange!
>
> So, while I thought zimbra was really sweet (easy to manage, lots of
> nice features), the users really missed certain exchange features.
> Zimbra does offer a community version, so throw that up on a vmware
> image and try it out.  Have your users really try it out and see
> what's broken for them.
>
> I'm not clear if you're really asking this, but managing a linux
> machine as a production machine was not the issue.  I have been
> admin-ing several linux machines for years in real production
> settings, and it's never been difficult.
>