Moral Question - Imail Migration Tool & OSS Zimbra Admin

[raj]

I guess this is more of a moral question instead of a technical one

We at i2k2 Systems have 7 years of experience working with Imail, Mail Enable, Merak and other windows based email servers on enterprise level hosting. We adopted Zimbra in its early days since mid 2005
We have integrated Zimbra OSS in our hosting control panels and created our own Zimbra OSS admin fully integrated in our hosting platform. We have more than 8000+ shared or dedicated email users on Zimbra OSS on more than 15 servers.
We have moved thousands of users/domains from Imail to Zimbra in past few months and in this process we have created a Migration Tool and OSS Zimbra Admin, which does the following

Imail to Zimbra Migration:
1) Support all version of Imail from 6.0 to 2000 and all versions of Zimbra
2) Imail users with passwords and email quota to Zimbra users and quota
3) Imail aliases to Zimbra distribution lists
4) User filters in Imail to Zimbra user filters
5) Imail user address book entries to Zimbra address book & contacts
6) Imail user signatures to Zimbra user identity signature
7) Imail user forwarding to Zimbra user forwarding setting
8) Creates IMAPSync commands script to run on Zimbra server to transfer email
9) Windows installer based on Inno-setup
10) 100% source code written in-house for this tool

OSS Zimbra Admin
1) Written in ASP + VB + SQL Server 2000 which uses Zimbra XML API can easily be converted to PHP & MySQL
2) Allows creation of domain Administrators users based on SQL DB
3) Can allot multiple domains per administrator
4) Allows the following per domain
Add User
Delete User
Change User Password
Control User Quota
Paged Listing of Users

Add Distribution List
Delete Distribution List
Update Distribution List
Paged Listing of Distribution List

Above is all that is 99% needed in shared hosting to give to end client as rest of the functions are built into end user options.

Now the moral questions is we would like to share this with open source community and give back a little in exchange of using OSS Zimbra but we have lots of hosting competitors in India and abroad which heavily use Imail and would like to move to Zimbra and they don’t have tools to 100% migrate Imail to Zimbra OSS or they don’t use Zimbra OSS for shared hosting as they don’t have Seprate Admin in OSS and releasing these tools we will cut down the professional edge over them.

So Question is what can we do and what model can we use to release our tool
1) 100% Source and Binary Release
2) Binary Release of the tool to be used as Freeware
3) Or some kind of mixed licensee where we do something different?

We also like to start initiative to create similar migration tools for Mailenable and Merak or other Windows email servers integrated into 1 tool

I would really appreciate input from Zimbra and our OOS community to help us decide.

Thanks
Raj S Vrach
i2k2 Systems

[raj]

I am little bum’d by the fact that lots of people read the post but no one gave any input
Anything input will encourage us to really put more effort to get this out to OSS community.

Thanks
Raj

[mmorse]

Well I would certainly love to see both! (but I understand the predicament)

Not quite exactly your same situation (this person did promise from the get go to share then never did) but you might see some of the reactions in Zimbra 4.5.6 Open Source Synchronization - It works now ! (might be why people have laid low on replying to this)

On a lighter note there are 2 very active threads in it's place: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-...4j-code-2.html & Open Source Mobile Synchronisation

[raj]

Dear Mike:
i have read both articles as they were being published. I am on the message board reading all the time and I was very interested to see open source mobile sync but..

The difference here is that we are a committed business and also this is our first chance to participate in OSS community.

As of right now we have Imail Tool 95% done..let us work little bit more on the logging and error trapping and basic documentation and as I will promise on this thread ..We will release Imail Migration Tool 100% with source code and support it as required.
I guess we can keep a support option for someone who like to pay and get any migration done for them based on our tool..i guess that is fair to ask for.

I will keep everyone posted..please keep your inputs coming.
Thanks
Raj
i2k2 Systems

[raj]

Some screeshots of our tools..working hard to get them in shape so we can release them..






Pending..
1) need project page up
2) need to make wiki
3) basic documentation
4) strip down the zimbra admin as curretly its integrated into our control panel.
..and more


Thanks
Raj

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by raj

Some screeshots of our tools..working hard to get them in shape so we can release them..






Pending..
1) need project page up
2) need to make wiki
3) basic documentation
4) strip down the zimbra admin as curretly its integrated into our control panel.
..and more


Thanks
Raj

Very very cool stuff.

[mmorse]

BTW I know your not fully ready yet, but when you are Max Ma (from Hong Kong) is interested in the Imail migration tool.

[shaggy667]

raj, this looks great and thanks for sharing with the community. We are looking to move away from Imail and it would be awesome to have this migration tool to use...I can't wait to see it.

[raj]

Replied to your PM

Update:
I was traveling from last 2 weeks. I am back now and will pick up from where I left. I hope to finish the documentation ASAP and release the first version soon.

Raj

[PaulBM]

We're a school in the UK, who're using IMail and working on changing to Zimbra for a much more flexible system.

An IMail migration tool would be superb for us.

For future users, new teachers and students (two different domains) can Zimbra be set up to check via LDAP for new accounts and automatically create them an account? Our student domain creates IMail accounts whenever we add a new user.