I'm not clear what the negatives are for Exchange. It scales well, has
great support from both Microsoft and a host of other companies, it has the
best web client that I am aware of, supports more current mobile devices and
can be expected to support any significant future devices capable of email
and calendaring. Sure it costs money but so do most good systems. My sense
is that you tend to get what you pay for in both cars and software.
_____
From: Jon Galbreath [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 10:13 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] University-wide messaging and calendar system
Zimbra's a pretty good alternative to Exchange for a collaboration suite.
My only thought on it is: what's going to happen to it now that it's been
purchased by Yahoo?
From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Troy Murray
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 9:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MSUNAG] University-wide messaging and calendar system
I enjoyed attending the MSU IT Exchange last Friday to discuss the
technology direction and concerns for the University as well as to share
ideas on what might be the best solutions.
In particular the topic Mr Davis discussed on the current University email
system and the possible directions that could be taken with it ("stay the
course", replace, upgrade, discontinue, etc) and the thoughts and feelings
of the audience. I can see their are some passionate individuals about this
topic.
While I feel the mail system could be better with updates, like a refreshed
web interface, I feel there is a much greater need for a University-wide
calendar system. I seem to remember Mr Gift commenting on how this topic
can be very sensitive with individuals and that one of the biggest
challenges with it is personal control to who can access your calendar and
what they can see or do.
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.
One advantage I see with this system is that users of Outlook can still
maintain their calendar, contacts and mail through Outlook, like they do
now, and all of that will be syncronized with the Zimbra server. It even
supports Outlook in cached mode. Those of us with Macs can use Mail.app,
iCal and Address book and this will sync (using iSync) to the server as
well.
There are a number of other features that I haven't looked at yet, such as
instant messaging, creating documents and custom components for VOIP or
mapping.
I see on their web site that they are having some webinars about campus wide
messaging using Zimbra, and comparing it to what Google is offering
(http://www.zimbra.com/about/webinars.html). I'm curious, has anyone at the
"University level" looked at Zimbra as a possible replacement for the
current messaging system? Is anyone on campus running Zimbra? If so, what
has been your experience with it?
Just my thoughts to try and get a discussion started on this topic.
--
Troy Murray
Informatics Specialist
Michigan State University
Biomedical Research & Informatics Center (BRIC)
100 Conrad Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: 517-432-4248
Fax: 517-353-9420
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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