edwin.arneson,
Welcome to the Zimbra Community. I am sorry that your first experience with Zimbra was negative. I have been around the product for about 3 years now and I do admit that earlier editions (pre-5.x) did seem a little lack luster, the release of 5.x and soon 6.x has brought many great improvements and unique features to Zimbra.
I have been a Microsoft engineer for 15+ years now. I have been fortunate to be a part of many diffrent types of infrastructure builds from the small 10 node LAN to the global, multi-datacenter GAN as I call it (gargantuan area network) that comprises thousands of servers and 300,000+ active nodes. However about 5 years ago I started really doing things in the COSS and FOSS worlds and I now do more Linux than I do Microsoft.
The reason I went into that is to offer a different perspective on the things you mention. As most any Microsoft person in the world, I have worked with Exchange quite a bit. From 5.5 to the most recent. The one thing that I see people do when they are first introduced to a product like Zimbra is just because its based upon Linux, is become hyper-critical and take any little bug that they may see and make it a show-stopper. I call this the 8,000lb Gorilla syndrome. Exchange is not perfect by any means. It has issues with OWA, it even has issues with Outlook and they are produced by the same company. But the one thing that a boss will never say if you recommend Exchange is "your fired, you wanted this Exchange product and look at the problems". In fact they would say "its Exchange, why doesn't work, get Microsoft on the horn". But, if that same person choose a lesser known, and in my humble opinion better product, such as Zimbra, the first time the smallest things happens (cause it will, Zimbra is no different than any other software, it has some bugs) then the boss say "what is this Zimbra product you put in, you means its not Exchange, your fired". So you can see that just because Exchange is more well known and a larger company, the bugs are overlooked to a large degree. That doesn't mean it doesn't have any by any means.
So with that being said, the things you mentioned in my mind are not big issues by any means. The first one you mentioned is not even accurate, in my install at least. Give Zimbra a chance. I think what you will find is that Zimbra is a secure, robust, scalable, feature rich collaboration server.
God Bless,
Marty  |