I work in a high school and have just completed a migration to Zimbra using exclusively the web client for admin staff, teachers, external support agencies and students.
I was anticipating most resistance from the Outlook users, but they have taken to the web client remarkably well. Thumbs-up to Zimbra there for creating a highly-innovative web client - thanks!
We used to have a few Outlook and Outlook Express users (admin and headteacher); but we decided against the continuation of these for several reasons:
- Reinstalling or restoring workstations meant we had to backup and restore local 2GB+ PST/DBX files each time - nightmare. We've wasted hours/days restoring these.
- Open source edition, so no Outlook connector for us.
- Training - all users using the same platform is easier for everyone
The Windows-based network currently has IE6 installed for all users, and we found that the web client performs much better in Firefox. To provide the best possible experience for all users I decided to push out a customised
Prism webapp (the same application used to access Zimbra Desktop - a 'cut down' Firefox). This also means there's more screen real-estate for their email
To make it
even easier for our users (teachers, bless them
) I created a
C# application that takes advantage of the Pre-authentication feature to launch the Prism application and save them having to type their username and password. This is one less barrier to face when tempting our Outlook users away from the dark side