Quote:
Originally Posted by bdial  i'm curious
Did you guys do an evaluation of zimbra before purchasing? |
Yes, it was evaluated. It replaced both an in-house web mail system as well as Oracle Calendar.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bdial It sounds like you've done some pretty comprehensive testing way more than most. |
As previously mentioned, I'm in IT here, but for the purposes of the e-mail system, I'm just a user. Hence, I didn't test Zimbra, I've just encountered lots of bug trying to use it.
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Originally Posted by bdial Were you part of the decision making process? If so or not, are you aware of why they decided to go ahead with zimbra implementation? |
No, I was not part of the decision making processes. I don't have specific details as to their decision to go ahead (for instance, I don't know if they looked at anything else). One exigency was to get rid of the expense of Oracle Calendar and another requirement was to advance the functionality of the web mail system. I believe they are interested in the promise of the "collaboration suite" aspects of Zimbra and I'd suppose they didn't encounter any show-stopper bugs.
They do know there are bugs and issues (cf.
SFU.ca » IT Services » Email at SFU » SFU Connect Calendar: Known Issues), but obviously the pros outweighed the cons.
I don't hate ZCS, and I even like some aspects a lot. The number of bugs seems mind-boggling, though, and suggested some sort of deficiency on Zimbra's side (the company) and hence the original question to see what opinions people had as to the reason.
Either testing or the specification of fixes/ehancements seems very deficient. For instance, take item (55) on my list:
Preferences/Shortcuts/Saved Search Shortcuts says
you can "Assign numeric shortcuts to Saved Searches."
In fact you can't. What you can do is assign numeric
shortcuts to saved Mail searches. Any other application's
saved searches don't appear in the "Choose Search" list
when you click on the "Browse..." button.
Someone wrote the code to enable saved searches. Someone wrote the code to enable saved search shortcuts. Someone presumably tested the features. Yet it doesn't work like you'd expect. Unlike some of the issues I noted, this isn't obscure; this isn't some hard to find feature. And combined with (54) why add this feature if it is going to be done so badly? Sure, part of it works, but why not do it correctly or don't do it at all? (Note that (55) is in Bugzilla as 12062 and tagged as an enhancement. If the preferences said "Assign numeric shortcuts to Saved Mail Searches in the default search folder" then 12062 would be an enhancement request. Since it says "Saved Searches" and doesn't work like it says, how can this not be a bug?)