[SOLVED] is zimbra the right tool for our organization

[bitbonk]

We are a small non profit organization, a parents' initiative maintaing a kindergarden. And we have the following problem:

Our webhoster where or Joomla! based website is hosted, allows us to have near unlimited pop3/smtp mail accounts. We make use of this feature to organize mail distribution. We have an account to contact all members, one for a newsletter, one for the board of directors and one for each parents work group.

1.
Now to administer the email Adresses that belong to each mailing list we have to login to the hoster web frontent of each account and and add or remove adresses there. If a person leaves the organization we might need to login to 3-4 accounts and remove the adress from the mailing list. You can easily imagine that this is rather tedious.

2.
Also the web access for each account is used by each work group and the bord of directors to organize additional things such as commonly needed files or appointments. Since each account is totally isolated you can not share files or appointments across accounts.

3.
All these things need to be done in the very flawed/limited web frontend of the hoster. No spelling correction, you have to be carefull that a session does not expire and copy and paste is limited. It'd be great to take most of the tasks offline onto the desktop. The only thing we can do right now is via pop3/smtp. But that doesn't give us access to the files, appointments or mailing lists.

Can Zimbra solve these problems for us? If we'd find a Zimbra hoster can we keep using the the existing email accounts with our domain name, e.g. members@ourorganization.de? Most of us aren't really computer experts. Is management of the things described in 1.-3. easy enough?

We don't really need anything more that described here. We like to keep it as simple as possinle. Is Zimbra to big for us?

If you think Zimbra is the right choice, what do we need? How does it work?

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Using a Zimbra Hosting Partner would remove all the administration, apart from creating your own mailboxes and distribution lists etc, but have you thought about running your own Zimbra installation using the community edition ? I guess the question is would you have the resources to manage it yourself; if not a hosted solution would be perfect for you. You will really like Zimbra

[bitbonk]

Thanks. Do you know of a way to actually try those things. I see that zimbra.com only has a client test account ...

[h_aleksi]

Well you have couple ways to test those administration features.
1. You make virtualmachine to your computer (using example VirtualBox) and set-up own zimbra foss server there.
2. If you are thinking about buying zimbra as hosted you can try to contact local hosting provider for some kind of demo tour or test account with Domain Admin priviledges.

List of Zimbra hosting partners can be found at Email hosting and enterprise messaging hosted service providers of Zimbra software

[bitbonk]

Originally Posted by uxbod

Welcome to the forums

Using a Zimbra Hosting Partner would remove all the administration, apart from creating your own mailboxes and distribution lists etc, but have you thought about running your own Zimbra installation using the community edition ? I guess the question is would you have the resources to manage it yourself; if not a hosted solution would be perfect for you. You will really like Zimbra

So Zimbra can solve all of the above?

[h_aleksi]

With zimbra you can create mailin lists called as Distribution List. You need to make changes on distribution list only once.

In zimbra there are briefcases where you can upload files. You can set up as many briefcase you want and set shares + access permission invidually (read, write etc..). Shared briefcases you can access from any account.

For 3rd question:
You can take spell-correction away. I dont understand reason for unexpired sessions if you would want to take copy/paste away. Tbh i am not sure if taking copy paste away is possible. I dont think it adds any real security improvement and unexpired sessions would undo point of that anyway.

But yes you can set sessions length.

You might want to try Zimbra Desktop software as mail client. Think it has some kind of offline functionality and it can do almoust every thing than ajax-client in browser (it just bit behind on development than web-client, nothing major anyway)...