Originally posted by: Nothinman
Zimbra is a good product but its still generations behind Exchange. Its going to take a lot for Zimbra to steal market share from Exchange, since MS offers good pricing and features in SBS and EBS.
What's missing? I honestly haven't looked at it very closely.
From a client side, Zimbra looks pretty comparable. The web client looks pretty nice - AJAX based, comparable to Exchange 2007. I don't know how well the Outlook integration is (this is essential for Enterprise) or how well the mobile push capabilities work, though.
On the server side, Exchange is generations ahead. Zimbra supports clustering via Redhat clustering. You have to configure your own backing store. You'd have to set up MySQL replication, DRBD replication or SAN replication, etc. CCR clustering on Exchange 2007 is much easier to set up and handles all the replication for you. 2010 introduces DAG which allows more than 2 servers in a replication group. There's a lot less to break. Configurations are more consistent, meaning that people have the same types of problems which equals more shared solutions. All operations in Exchange 2007 and up are based on PowerShell applets, making scripting everything and anything very easy.
Exchange is also getting features enabling companies to use a mix of hosted and server-based Exchange.
Could you make Zimbra comparable to a enterprise level Exchange 2007 installation? Probably. Would it be easy or cheaper? Not a chance.
You can create ADM templates for just about anything. I think someone has actually written a FireFox ADM that's fairly complete. Scripting covers everything else and its very easy to get scripts to run on whatever subset of machines or users that you want.
Yeah you could do all this on Ubuntu, but is it easy?
If you've got to write scripts to handle everything else then it's just as difficult, probably moreso because VBScript/JScript aren't as easy to work with as bash, perl or python.
You don't have to write scripts to handle everything, just stuff that's more custom.
VBScript is trivial and there's about a billion sample code snippets on the web. Bash syntax, while not too difficult, is mind boggling compared to VBScript.
Don't like VBScript, then use AutoIT. Both are easy as pie and extremely powerful in their own ways. PowerShell is even better, although its still evolving in a lot of ways.
Have you ever done any admin type scripting on Windows?
**shrugs** There isn't any small set of things to do when you're the admin assistant for a scientific PI and are expected to help him cite and write his papers, help him prepare exams, create presentations, etc. That's the typical admin assistant where I'm at. Admin assistants for other higher up/intellectual type people are just as good. They have to be.
Well my experience with them is pretty different. Some of them were really good but most were just following instructions left by someone else. And really, in either case a transition shouldn't be terrible because if they're really that smart they should pickup the new methods quickly and if they're not and are just following directions they just have to remember to use the new post-it instead of thet old.
And none of that refutes the fact that many places have already gone through at least 1 major transition in Office 2k3->2k7. Everyone who upgraded pretty much had to learn everything from scratch once and they were willing to spend the time on it and they survived.
Different expectations of employees, I guess. Our admin assistants have to be sharp and self motivated or they don't last.
I link Linux could really shine in the small business office. The needs aren't so extravagant, and people could help train each other due to the small size. The business makes out by not having to buy expensive licenses for O/Ss, servers, and productivity software.
Especially since most of them outsource the major work to other companies already. If those IT service companies would start getting into and pushing Linux we could see a lot of SBS servers cease to exist.
Not mine, but I'll comment. Why would an IT service company push Linux? What is making a Linux solution more compelling than a Windows SBS or EBS solution?
IT Service companies are a business, selling to another business. They have to make an effective case. Will Linux save them money? Why? Will it decrease TCO over the lifetime of the hardware?
rg and Ubuntu shouldn't be that bad, it's not like it's all written in Mandarin Chinese. Lots of people dealt with the training involved with XP->Vista and Office 2k3->2k7 which are similar in scope.
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