Zimbra Apple iSync Beta

[Kirkaiya]

For a small office ( <20 users), would you consider a hosted Zimbra solution?

You'd get all the benefits of the network version (connectors, the new iSync native sync for Mac, backed-up centrally-managed server that you never have to mess with, and you can (with the right hosting provider) be a domain admin for your domain, giving you control over your users, etc.

All without having to buy a server, or stress out because you (a) clearly like and want the Network edition, but (b) your office is pretty small, and can't afford the $1450.

Hosting plans are about $7/user per month (from the ones I've seen posted). Check around - maybe one less thing for you to have to deal with internally. Just my 2 cents !!

[flint]

took a look at your comparison chart, most of the features you left out in the public version are only relevant for companies with many workspaces (e.g. clustering) or resellers (e.g. rebranding). Very comprehensible.

However, syncing is important beginning with a single user, and is already crucial for ultra small workgroups, such as ours, where the costs per seat just don´t match.
The first months it would only be me, doing heavy testing, trying to convice the remaining non-nerdy staff, and within a year there won´t be more than 3 additional users.

all in all I would suggest making it a little bit more accessible for non-profit to mini-companies, let it spread, gain reputation, selling more copies to bigger companies in the end.

you bred a monster, but you´re restraining it
just my two cents

[KevinH]

Thanks Flint... We have the trial version available which would allow you to test all the network features. If you need more time and have some valid concerns why then it may be possible to extend that.

[ojehle]

For a small office ( <20 users), would you consider a hosted Zimbra solution?

You'd get all the benefits of the network version (connectors, the new iSync native sync for Mac, backed-up centrally-managed server that you never have to mess with, and you can (with the right hosting provider) be a domain admin for your domain, giving you control over your users, etc.

All without having to buy a server, or stress out because you (a) clearly like and want the Network edition, but (b) your office is pretty small, and can't afford the $1450.

Hosting plans are about $7/user per month (from the ones I've seen posted). Check around - maybe one less thing for you to have to deal with internally. Just my 2 cents !!

but you forget the security... if a company isn't allowed to store customer data outside, its not possible to host zimbra..

[bbska]

A lot of people here seem to be missing a larger point:
Zimbra is creating a wonderful groupware solution that eventually could (and I hope does) rival exchange. They've been kind enough to provide the community with an open source version of this suite which, very correctly so, does not have all of the features in the network version. I've seen plenty of OSS projects that follow a model exactly like this (wine being one of them...). There is a pay to use version that has all of the new features, and then there's the free version that those features eventually trickle down to. If you want all of the new features (such as syncing, hot backup/restore , etc ) then pay for it. If not, wait for it to trickle down.

If you can't wait, then write it yourself - it IS open source, so this should be trivial. Would Zimbra be against such a user-created solution being made freely available (though unsupported by zimbra ) ?

If you can't do that, find someone who can, or find another product.

Zimbra has already made an incredibly wonderful product that I enjoy using even with it's limited features. Sure I would find iSync support incredibly useful, but I can wait for it to be released open source.

Perhaps the pricing model is a bit "off", but that's not for us to say. Zimbra has to price things how they deem neccesary. They're well aware that there are users out there who would love to use the network edition but who can't afford it right now, and I'm sure they've factored that into their decision on the pricing model.

The fact is that people are being greedy. If everyone got all of the features they wanted for free, nobody would pay anything and zimbra wouldn't exist.

[KevinH]

Would Zimbra be against such a user-created solution being made freely available (though unsupported by zimbra )?

Not at all. We encourage this and if we like it we'll even send you a hat or shirt. Take DSPAM for example. Our first few beta's didn't even work with it but the community thought it was important and got it working. They posted a how-to, and now we've integrated DSPAM into the product and made training of both DSPAM and SpamAssassin automatic by default. So here's an example where the community stepped up and helped Zimbra become better.


PS: If you were one of the original hackers to get DSPAM working PM me a link to your post(s) and I'll send you a Zimbra shirt.

[bbska]

Not at all. We encourage this and if we like it we'll even send you a hat or shirt. Take DSPAM for example. Our first few beta's didn't even work with it but the community thought it was important and got it working. They posted a how-to, and now we've integrated DSPAM into the product and made training of both DSPAM and SpamAssassin automatic by default. So here's an example where the community stepped up and helped Zimbra become better.

That's what I thought. The beauty of projects like this is that the community can contribute just as much as the organization that produces the project.

Keep up the good work, guys.

[phoenix]

Not at all. We encourage this and if we like it we'll even send you a hat or shirt. Take DSPAM for example. Our first few beta's didn't even work with it but the community thought it was important and got it working. They posted a how-to, and now we've integrated DSPAM into the product and made training of both DSPAM and SpamAssassin automatic by default. So here's an example where the community stepped up and helped Zimbra become better.

That sounds like an excellent enhancement to Zimbra, I'll look forward to the next release (soon?).

KevinH, Just an additional question about the releases of Zimbra. I assume you'll continue to release developers builds, do you intend to release them on a (rough) schedule or will it be more ad-hoc as features/bugs are fixed?

[KevinH]

That sounds like an excellent enhancement to Zimbra, I'll look forward to the next release (soon?).

KevinH, Just an additional question about the releases of Zimbra. I assume you'll continue to release developers builds, do you intend to release them on a (rough) schedule or will it be more ad-hoc as features/bugs are fixed?

The goal is every week. Idea is we push a build to our live mail server for internal use (@zimbra.com). If it works and seems stable for a couple days we'll replicate it to each OS and post it as a developer build. So if things are smooth you'll see a new build approx each week. You can at least have some confidence in our dev builds as they have run as our production mail server for a few days. Not anywhere near the QA a GA build would get but at least will ensure the upgrade/install works and basic functionality is working.

At the moment there are some issues around calendar which is why we didn't post a build last week. Assuming we get those ironed out we will get a build out by the end of this week.

[phoenix]

Every week is impressive, there'll be nothing left to develop in 12 months if you continue at this rate.

I have this pathological desire to install the most recent version of software that I use (with a suitable backup, of course) so this'll keep me happy for a while.