MS exchange

[drdre]

Morning all.. sorry for making a new post on this.
I am still in the processing of pointing out to the big guys at my company why we should use zimbra over outlook.

We are a small company and have been using zimbra FOSS for alittle over a year i believe before i made the switch to the demo NE edition. I switched to the NE edition mainly for an easy backup process and also Attachment search, HTML attachment rendering, Storage management and Outlook/MAPI sync.

Now am i an odd spot. Even thou i was instructed by management to upgrade to the NE demo, the consultant (he knows not one $$$$ about linux nor opensource application )my company hired has been pushing for us to use MS exchange. Now thanks to Aaron Rosenthal (of Special applied Intelligence and MMORSE of Zimbra) i have the ZCS Exchange product comparison guide and i have a bit more knownledge of Zimbra.

Over the years i have worked with Exchange and other high end microsoft products and have been greatly not happy with a high level of availability of exchange aka UPTIME and easy of recovery incase of software or system failure..

I am more a practical person who would give examples of situations where MS exchange isnt applicable. But in this scenario they want have facts about why we should go zimbra and not exchange.

Does any have a document with this or does zimbra sales department have a well document point list that would point out the strengths of zimbra and at what it beats exchange at.

[cmcbride]

I've administrated a Zimbra server with about 600 users for the past couple of years. And I've installed and administrated Exchange 2000, 2003, and 2007.

Feature wise I'm hard pressed to come up with something that Exchange will do that Zimbra won't. And generally it seems that even if the exact feature isn't present, there's a way to accomplish the same thing - just differently.

What it likely comes down to is money. A 75 user installation of Exchange 2007 with CALs will likely run you $5500-$6000. Not including the special backup software you have to have to back it up (Microsoft included backup for Exchange 2007 isn't available until SP2 which isnt out yet). So add on another $1800 or so for backup software (guesstimate). Now Microsoft doesn't offer support at a reasonable price per year, it's pretty much per incident. If you're experienced and lucky you don't have to call them. But lets just say you do at $495 at least once a year.

Oh yeah I didn't include the OS costs. Windows Server 2008 64-bit $795, plus CALs $2250 (I think the OS cals are required even if it's just to access Exchange).

Oh wait, I forgot you'll need Office 2007 CALs as well. $380/ea = $28875. Of course you may already have those with your desktops but lets say you didn't so we can compare apples to apples.

I come up with around $40000. Not including hardware.

That's your argument right there. If the company is willing to pay that so that they get the Microsoft product the consultant tells them to - then there's not much you can do about it honestly.

Good luck.

[nrc]

Originally Posted by cmcbride

Feature wise I'm hard pressed to come up with something that Exchange will do that Zimbra won't. And generally it seems that even if the exact feature isn't present, there's a way to accomplish the same thing - just differently.

There's actually quite a lot. Most of them are trivial, but some are substantial. If the OP's users haven't used Exchange (or some other enterprise messaging system) they probably won't miss them much. But users accustomed to these features will miss them and complain loudly.

Here are some of the ones our users complain about most frequently:

Bug 3907 - forward appointments
Bug 6045 - allow attachment of contacts to messages
Bug 7257 - Support read receipts in webmail
Bug 7524 - Delayed delivery of mail
Bug 10287 - Alert Server
Bug 22014 - Recall message from Outlook/ZWC.
Bug 27613 - Tasks should be integrated into Calendar app
Bug 29849 - Alert user when accepting a conflicting appointment

[cmcbride]

Originally Posted by nrc

There's actually quite a lot. Most of them are trivial, but some are substantial. If the OP's users haven't used Exchange (or some other enterprise messaging system) they probably won't miss them much. But users accustomed to these features will miss them and complain loudly.

Well this is true. If the user's prior experience was POP3/IMAP then they won't notice these things for the most part.

In my opinion the reason why I end up installing Exchange is because due to the Windows comfort factor. Its easy to find engineers to work on it, and easy to find solutions to problems (most of the time). At least compared to the perceived difficult to support Linux environment. While I could argue that Windows is just as complicated as Linux (especially once you get into the weeds of AD, Exchange 2007 shell commands, etc), I can't argue that it's significantly easier to find engineers that can figure Windows than those that can figure Linux out. At least in my part of the country.

I know it's sacrilege but if they released a Zimbra that installed on Windows as a Windows app, they'd increase their installed base significantly.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by cmcbride

I know it's sacrilege but if they released a Zimbra that installed on Windows as a Windows app, they'd increase their installed base significantly.

That would be a possibility if there was a build of Postfix for Windows, there isn't so I guess it's not likely to happen in the short term (short term is, of course, a completely flexible concept ).

[mtorres]

I have never administered Exchange, so my opinion might not be completely valid. But, I have been a user of exchange, and from my user experience, the biggest difference I have noticed is the uptime. When I was a user of exchange, exchange would sometimes be down for a few days, and it wasn't wierd for the exchange system to have to be rebooted. My Zimbra system has been on for over a year, never having to reboot. I work for a school district and I know some other schools that are using exchange and I've sent emails to those schools districts and have had them bounce back and they told me it was due to exchange being down. Another thing (out of many) I think Zimbra has over MS is the updates and security patches. Take a few weeks ago for example, some guy posted that he had information about a critical security issue in the forums. A few days later I get an email with a link to a patch and instructions on how to patch it. I wouldn't know, but I highly doubt you could get that fast/level of service with exchange.

[drdre]

one thing to note here guys is that in my country the exchange rate is 1USD to 6.35TTD.. so 40,000USD is over 250k TTD...