Shared Calendaring (Exchange Zimbra)

[eng_ak]

Hi,

I am thinking about a migration from Exchange. My customer's upper level management requires to use Outlook, while ordinary users can use any IMAP client. Can anyone please help me answer these questions:

1- If managers use Exchange, and users use Zimbra. Will they be able to see shared calendar, and set meetings transparently from outlook/web_or_ical ?

2- If I choose to run a Network edition server for managers, and an OSS server for users. With managers using Outlook to connect to their server. Again, will the two mail servers be able to exchange calendar entries ?

Finally, you have a really good product. I beleive your licensing scheme is not flexible enough though! It is either all or nothing!! IMHO, with a cost of 75% of Exchange, this is not next to compelling to migrate from Exchange.
I think you need to allow some user accounts to be network-edition, while others are not (and not benefiting from some advanced features)

Best Regards
Keep up the excellent work

[KevinH]

1 - Yes.

2 - Yes/No. You can schedule calender entries but you won't be able to see Free busy on Network vs OSS.

Finally - 75% of Exchange... Not sure how you got to that figure. Are you a non-profit or school where you get significant Exchange discounts? If so you'd be better off contacting sales and working off the non-profit or education pricing to compare.

We've heard the feedback on our license scheme. Feel free to search and read more but in general it's more than the advanced features. It's support, priority bugfixes, and of course the advanced features. The first 2 are hard to split out for a single customer. We may chose to change the license options in the future but for the time they are very simple and all-or-nothing.

[robbyt]

semi off topic...

I'm sure the zimbra sales people could give you more detailed pricing, but I recenently priced out a exchange vs zimbra @ 45 users for a company:

exchange would have cost around 32,000 for software(win2k3, veritas, symantic, exchange) plus two servers, plus $500 per year for antivirus+spam filtering updates. Plus several [painful] hours of my time doing install/config of exchange.

zimbra has much lower realistic system requirements, plus only one machine is needed for such a small number of users, so it ended up costing the company $2k for a server and then $1750 per year for software (redhat included). I can get zimbra on rhel up and running within an hour, easy.

so, 75%? nope