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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