Re: just saying hello

[Rich Graves <rgraves@carleton.edu>]

Hello!

I was in a similar spot 2 years ago -- a competently managed Cyrus infrastructure (after years of inept management) but desire from administration (*not* from faculty or students) for integrated calendaring and mobile device support.

Going into the evaluation, my first choice was Google Apps, because history showed that Carleton was too small to competently run their own email infrastructure. Yes, I could do it, but I was the first person in in a decade with more than 2 years' professional experience to take charge of Carleton's UNIX environment, and I wasn't sure I was going to stay. While I have limited sympathy for IT departments afraid for their jobs in a cloud-leaning world (personally, I'd much rather leave solved problems like email & calendaring to others, and do more creative work in support of teaching & research), it didn't take long for me to come around to the line of thinking at http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-education/18557-edu-policy-discussion.html

My second choice was to retain the perfectly good Cyrus IMAP store and find a separate server to support calendaring. But no good calendaring server appeared.

It helped that the software we found from this crazy "Zimbra" fad startup installed on the first try and had some design features that thoroughly impressed me, like the included d2d backup. Zimbra's search and tagging features are *amazing*, so much better than what you can do with Cyrus squatter and local client searches that it completely changes the way you look at email -- the document is old, but the vision expressed in http://files.zimbra.com/website/docs/Zimbra%20Fixing%20Email%20Whitepaper.pdf is real. I also liked Zimbra's open APIs *a lot*. Zimbra was the only package that allowed us to demonstrate centralized provisioning of institutional and student/faculty course calendars. None of the Exchange users or Microsoft integrators with whom we spoke considered what I was able to demonstrate two weeks after installing Zimbra for the first time achievable. Exchange does currently have a clear advantage in unified communications and certain proprietary interfaces, though, due to obvious market share advantages.

Our evaluation and migration project archive is at http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/its/email/project_archive/. Note that there are a few things in the "Email/Calendar Advisory Committee Report" with which I disagree, notably the recommendation of Outlook. Experience has shown that I was correct -- Outlook has proven less popular than the Zimbra web interface, even among the administrative power users who, according to some in IT, "would demand nothing less than a fully featured fat client."

Caveat: Zimbra is not open source in the sense that Cyrus is. The rate of change is so great, and there is so much code with so many interlocking dependencies, and the build environment is so complex, that it isn't practical to apply even critical patches before Zimbra QA officially blesses a binary release. Even then, official releases can be pulled, as happened with 5.0.4, but I would rate Zimbra's overall code quality and responsiveness to issues as vastly better than what is provided by Microsoft or Novell. Zimbra will be less stable and will require more of your time than Cyrus, but it does much, much more.
-- 
Rich Graves http://claimid.com/rcgraves
Carleton.edu Sr UNIX and Security Admin
CMC135: 507-222-7079 Cell: 952-292-6529