On Oct 15, 2007, at 9:46 AM, Troy Murray wrote:
--snip--
>
> Personally I've been looking into the Zimbra Collaboration Suite
> (http://www.zimbra.com/products/) which seems to provide a fully
> featured messaging, calendaring, contact management package. The
> system can be run in a hosted enviroment or purchased and run at
> the University level on our own servers.
>
> For those unfamiliar with Zimbra, it provides messaging using all
> of the standard protocols (POP3, IMAP and SMTP with or without SSL)
> so stand-alone programs like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla
> Thunderbird, Eudora or Apple Mail.app would work with it. In
> addition a fancy AJAX webmail interface is provided, as well as a
> non-fancy HTML one, and a very nice mobile interface for those
> wishing to access the system that way.
>
> Zimbra also provides a calendar to each user and allows the user to
> control access to it from other users. With permissions set users
> can even "subscribe" to anothers calendar using the iCal standard
> protocol with programs like Apple's iCal or Mozilla Sunbird
> (Windows, Linux, Mac) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 or 2003 with a
> plug-in.
>
I agree. I have been playing around with Zimbra myself. I think it is
just a very slick piece of software. I really like its interface and
I think it is a very complete client in terms of functionality.
One hurdle I see with Zimbra is that(if I recall correctly) to get
the Outlook plug-in you have to use the "for pay" version of Zimbra
which has a per-user licensing scheme.
According to the project.mail stats page(http://project.mail.msu.edu/
~rrdtool/), the MSU email system has around ~160,000 users. Unless
the per-user license is less than a couple of dollars, it will be
pretty expensive to provide that particular capability to our campus.
I certainly am not privy to how much money the MSU e-mail group has
to spend on their services, but knowing the traditionally tight
budgets that state universities face all over the place, I think that
per-user licensing is probably a pretty costly consideration.
--Ray
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