[natrixgli]

I work for a nonprofit of about 150 users (mostly old ladies familiar with Microsoft Outhouse)

We now use ZWC exclusively. About 30% Love it, 30% Hate it, and 40% could care less how they get their mail. The biggest complaint is speed, but then we have many underpowered desktops, and this can be solved by using the HTML client. (of course then you lose docs, and briefcases..)

I must say, as much of a Zimbra fanboy as I am, the quality and usability of the web client has gone down some since 5.0. It's not showstoppers, but little nuisances such as:

- Deleted tag, tag reappeared about a dozen times because web client was open on another computer.
- Some shortcuts that require the ALT key don't work (on FF / Ubuntu at least... Not sure about Windows)
- Seems like a lot more button pressing is required to get new messages to appear in the inbox
- Auto-populated GAL contacts in contact picker do not update when new users are added to the system
- When adding attendees to an appointment using auto-complete, users often get "blah appears to be invalid, send message anyway?"
- Sometimes a "Chats" folder appears, even if IM is disabled system-wide
- Searching calendar appointments produces inconsistent results

On the other hand, we love the fact that:

- The client looks much nicer, especially the HTML client.
- Calendars can be published in HTML format on the web
- Contact picker can autopopulate and can load more than 50 contacts
- There is a mobile client
- etc, etc, etc.

The reason we ONLY allow users to get mail via ZWC is that we can enforce a message lifetime policy and prevent users from storing messages offline by disabling IMAP and POP3. The goal was to get people to use email for what email is supposed to be - messaging - NOT file storage, etc. Having briefcases and documents makes this much easier, though it would be kind of cool if you could "send to documents" much like you can "send to briefcase".

We won't downgrade though because some new features in 5.0 were necessary, and the performance feels much better than 4.5.x. We could live without the inconsistency and bugs. We use 30% Ubuntu Linux 7.10 / Firefox, and 70% Windows XP / IE 7.0.

-n8