WOW!!! and a couple of questions

[Styles]

Hello all, I'm hope to get some suggestions and or input from other Admins who have some experience with Zimbra.

My situation is: Exchange 5.5 using NT Domain login with http://Mailscanner.info on a Gentoo box as the mailgateway for virus and spam. And my plan is to roll out AD and Exchange 2003 over Thanksgiving weekend (I hate my life)

Anyway I would love to use Zimbra as my Exchange killer, now for the questions.

1. Production Ready? I only have about 100 users and they love the calendaring functions e.g. Having other people manage other peoples calendar/contacts in Outlook. Also the ability to open other peoples inbox or other mailfolders in outlook.

2. What would be the best migration path? Roll up to AD then Migrate? or skip AD and Migrate to Zimbra? Any other input or Ideas would be great.

3. Do I really have to use Red Hat whats the Source Install path like? I would really love to use Gentoo and I would provide a howto for Gentoo until an ebuild comes out.

4. Anything else that can help me sell this to upper management? Besides my argument that proprietary formats and protocols are bad!

6. Thank for your time

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by Styles

Hello all, I'm hope to get some suggestions and or input from other Admins who have some experience with Zimbra.

My situation is: Exchange 5.5 using NT Domain login with http://Mailscanner.info on a Gentoo box as the mailgateway for virus and spam. And my plan is to roll out AD and Exchange 2003 over Thanksgiving weekend (I hate my life)

Anyway I would love to use Zimbra as my Exchange killer, now for the questions.

1. Production Ready? I only have about 100 users and they love the calendaring functions e.g. Having other people manage other peoples calendar/contacts in Outlook. Also the ability to open other peoples inbox or other mailfolders in outlook.

We run it in production here at Zimbra. We'd recommend waiting for the GA before taking a larger install live. The GA version will have shared calendar and we know that's very important to many of you current Exchange folks.

Originally Posted by Styles

2. What would be the best migration path? Roll up to AD then Migrate? or skip AD and Migrate to Zimbra? Any other input or Ideas would be great.

Well we have a migration tool that will automatically load accounts from AD and Exchange 2003. Eventually we'll have Exchange 5.5 support in the migration tool. So best bet if your thinking about moving soon would be to do the AD migration first.

Originally Posted by Styles

3. Do I really have to use Red Hat whats the Source Install path like? I would really love to use Gentoo and I would provide a howto for Gentoo until an ebuild comes out.

You can use Fedora Core too. At this time the source only will build pkgs for Fedroa/Red Hat. Others here have got Zimbra running on other distros. It's not that hard we just don't create an installer for all distros out of the box yet.

Originally Posted by Styles

4. Anything else that can help me sell this to upper management? Besides my argument that proprietary formats and protocols are bad!

Take a look at these two links:

http://www.zimbra.com/about/what_is_...ut_zimbra.html

[url="http://www.zimbra.com/pdf/Zimbra%20Fixing%20Email%20Whitepaper.pdf[/url]