Re: just saying hello

[Matt Mencel <MR-Mencel@wiu.edu>]

I will echo a lot of what Rich says about Zimbra, their support and responsiveness to problems, the complexity of the design, development of addons, etc....  Overall I enjoy working with Zimbra the product and Zimbra the company more than any other product or company I've ever dealt with....so that's my personal opinion.

We came from an environment very similar to yours Rudy.  We were running most of our users on UW-IMAP with whatever fat client(mostly Outlook or OE) they wanted or they could use Horde/IMP webmail.  We also had a small group of users on the Sun Calendar system with Cyrus IMAP and Outlook, and another portion of our campus using Groupwise.  Approximately 15,000 active users at any one time.

We also recently installed IronPort...which is a huge improvement for us.  It's allowed us to shut off spam checking on the Zimbra MTAs and drastically improved the mail delivery times.  Our MTAs are never busy anymore, even when administration injects a message to be delivered to all users.

We're running BES and Zimbra ZCB for our Blackberry users, but it's a PITA.  Partly due probably to ZCB still being beta.  It works way better than Notify though.  We'd really like to move the Blackberry users off to Windows Mobile or iPhone devices and get rid of BES....but the Blackberry users carry a lot of influence so I'm not sure that will happen.

We built a migration webpage that made it relatively easy to move users from the old systems into Zimbra.  Initially there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faculty and staff..."it doesn't work like Outlook/Groupwise"..."Zimbra sucks...because I say so"..."why are we using a beta quality product with so many bugs"...were a lot of the comments.  Like anything though...once most got past the initial shock of the change...they started to grow into liking the new features of Zimbra instead of missing what they had in their old system.  I won't say everyone loves it...there are always a few that hate everything, but we figure the number of haters will shrink as we move further on in time.  Students love it though compared to what they had with Horde/IMP.

Zimbra is not without it's issues....the code advances at a pretty rapid pace and I think that sometimes affects the quality of the updates.  There's hardly an update that goes by where they fix a bunch of bugs....and a bunch of new ones show up.  I think that's the nature of the beast though and we've learned to be a little more watchful before applying any new updates...waiting to see if any major problems appear that would affect the users badly.  We're still on 5.0.6 waiting for 5.0.9 for that reason.

I'm currently working on some ways to share university RSS Feeds and calendars with every account in the system.  Using some Ruby scripts to pull the data off of our university website, sticking it into a single account whose calendars and folders we then share with all accounts in the system.  Also in the works is putting student's class schedules into their Zimbra calendars.

So that's about where we are.

Matt Mencel
Western Illinois University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rudy Gevaert" <Rudy.Gevaert@ugent.be>
To: zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca
Sent: Thursday, August 7, 2008 3:50:04 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: just saying hello

Hi,

I just found out of this list.  I'm currently setting up a pilot with 
Zimbra NE.

Our current setup, cyrus based, exists of about 44.000 accounts and a 
couple of hundred Exchange accounts.  The cyrus setup consists of 6 
mailstores connected to an EMC CX400 and CX500.  On two sites we have 3 
mailstores. We use the Cyrus replication engine to replicate each site 
to the other site for DR.  Currently 2TB in use on the masters.  Because 
of the replication we have also 2TB on SATA disks.
Our users use Horde webmail, IMAP, POP, ...
We have perdition for imap/pop routing. Linux LVS loadbalancing for HA 
for the proxies and webmail servers.

We don't have a calendering system, nor shared mailboxes, nor mobile 
support.  (Except IMAP idle.)

I'm a big Cyrus fan :).  All in all our setup is stable and mature.

But because of the lack of support for mobiles, calendering, shared 
mailboxes we are looking at Zimbra.

We have a small Exchange setup, but that is supported by an other group. 
  We are looking at Zimbra as an alternative.

We also use Ironports as edge MTA and do spam scanning on them.

That's it for now.  I hope to find this list helpful and maybe I can 
even be helpful after some time.

Rudy
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Rudy Gevaert          Rudy.Gevaert@UGent.be          tel:+32 9 264 4734
Directie ICT, afd. Infrastructuur ICT Department, Infrastructure office
Groep Systemen                    Systems group
Universiteit Gent                 Ghent University
Krijgslaan 281, gebouw S9, 9000 Gent, Belgie               www.UGent.be
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