What's your business model?

[GertThiel]

Dear Zimbra people.

What's your business model? Do want to earn money with servie only or are you considering to become a hosting service?

I'm wondering whether Zimbra would make a good companion to Alfresco. That would require to drop Zimbra Store in favour to the Alfresco respository.

A good chance to reduce — avoid — the digital divide.

But I see the very different web client implementations: JSF at Alfresco and a more sophisticated AJAX solution at Zimbra.

- Gert

[jrobb]

Thank you for the note. We are still working through the details of the Zimbra network launch. We have been focusing on getting the Beta out and trying to do our best to listen and respond to the community before we launch the Network. You should expect to hear more from us soon on this topic.

As for document management integration with Alfresco or others, we are definitely looking at all the options. Clearly, we have leveraged and integrated mang other open source projects like MySQL and Postfix and our plan is to continue to do the same as we look at our roadmap.

Thank you for the lead on a potential good partner.

[GertThiel]

Thank you for the lead on a potential good partner.

Are you — the Zimbra team — in touch with the Alfresco team?

I pointed them to you and Paul called ZCS interesting.

I see a lot of synergy potential.

- Gert

[fselendic]

Thank you for the note. We are still working through the details of the Zimbra network launch. We have been focusing on getting the Beta out and trying to do our best to listen and respond to the community before we launch the Network. You should expect to hear more from us soon on this topic.

As for document management integration with Alfresco or others, we are definitely looking at all the options. Clearly, we have leveraged and integrated mang other open source projects like MySQL and Postfix and our plan is to continue to do the same as we look at our roadmap.

Thank you for the lead on a potential good partner.

Actually, that was my lead . However, I would like to back Gert's thoughts, what we really don't need is another set of disconnected, half done (feature wise) products (OpenXchane has what Zimbra has plus Project management, but ugly and cumberstone to setup, Sugar has what Zimbra has and OX has but without good PM and DM on not so fair license and on PHP etc, etc) . Alfresco is not just DMS (although people working on it are turbo turbo experts in DM, see their link with Documentum), alfresco is much more wider and nicely architectured content management system (thingy that could partly eliminate Gert's digital divide). When I (and Gert as far I can see) think about collaboration software for enterprises (SMB), I envision much wider scope than simple PIM/CIM (mail-contacts-calendar), we need CRM, telephony integration, Project Management, DM, ERP bits (human resources, asset management, general ledger) etc. Those thing all interconnect VERY much, and are nowdays done in separate "islands". Speaking of free solutions (and even commercial ones), it is huge undertaking, so there aren't many (or any, actually) free solutions with all needed functionality around. Why can't I see all channels of comunication (chats, phone talks/transcripts, mails, faxes) with my contact? Enterprise wide? All reports, charts, statistics of his spending/buying habits? What about my employees? Tasks I've given to them? Their CV's? Their contacts? Productivity? Payroles? Vacations? Transfering of tasks when on vacation? What about Items/goods/services my firm offers? History of purchases? Best buyers? Ad hoc campaigns? Results of campaigns? What about knowledge base? What if my marketing manager need different perspective on the same set of data than my programmer or accountant? If I'm doing services, how do I know how many times people called? How do they know in what stage exactly is their computer/paper/request? Can I SMS them when it is done? Or send a message? Or mail? Or call? Automatically?

It is a huge undertaking, but with selected, funded teams each working on they own field of expertise, but just with bigger picture in mind, something in the range of Domino/Lotus 7 but integrated with telephony and ERP/CRM could be done with all of OSS technology and knowledge and manpower around. Something like this:

Zimbra does classical PIM/CIM (email, contacts, calendar, chat, integration with peripherals like PDA's, phones or other PIM/CIM clients/servers)

Alfresco does content management (classical DM with bussines templates, integration with office suites like MSOffice and especially OpenOffice, storing and retreiving more general content like mail entries, calendar entries, reports, invoices, telephone calls etc, etc). Btw, Alfresco will be huge, they have huge knowledge and big contacts in enterprises, and they really know what they are doing.

Our team (www.rest-art.hr, sorry site is still not internationalized) makes HR, CRM, General Ledger, basically on top of alfresco and Zimbra, paid project is in planning phase (based on OMG, HR-XML, ebXML, OfBiz, with Inventory management comming in next phase, late 2006)

Asterisk does VoIP (part of our team is working with asterisk) and POTS telephony

JBOSS or Liferay gives server/portal environment (there is of course, much more of underlaying technology, but I'm a freak for portal interfaces . )

Pentaho does business intelligence (another of my favorite projects currently in incubator/alpha phase but with great future, basically using similar or same technology and with similar or same license, with great great people on board).

We loosely couple the damn thing around ESB and common workflow(s), iron out UI differences and approaches a little, package nicely, and let it in the wild to grow.

Each of our teams could offer a standalone products, but what would be extremely interesting is if we could make those standalone products interoperatible, making one huge enterprise platform to build upon. It is a huge undertaking, of course, but it needs just a great coordination of parties involved and planing on much wider scope, however, final result could be OSS product that looks like and in much aspect surpasses commercial business/productivity application suites like Domino/Lotus (I like their new offering veeeery much), stepping deep in the territory of giants like SAP, Oracle and such, with free and flexible OSS offering.


Filip Selendic
Rest Art, CTO

[mfeldstein]

We're looking closely at using Alfresco in a portalized environment where I work. I agree that part of the appeal is to use it as the basis for a unified content repository, with other applications built on top. Seeing Zimbra implemented with Alfresco on the back end and JSR-168 on the front end would be very interesting to us.

[slylos]

Not sure if this was discussed:

What about future license plans? Will all of your releases target OSS? Will you have some closed source/proprietary versions?

[sseveran]

I had never heard of Zimbra before yesterday or Alfresco before this post. Let me offer some thoughts as a Microsoft user. The thing that I like most about Microsoft products is the ease and depth of integration. That is one area where things seem to be easier than in the open source world. And don't tell me that I can do it myself. I don't have the time or resources to develop and maintain an integration project of any real substance.

I would be very interested in seeing a solution that combined both of these projects or atleast had integration in some real depth. An integration between Zimbra and Alfresco plus a good project management tool, CRM and other ERP features like accounting and integration with MS Office and other office suites would be a very attractive package. Remember the key is integration.

Just my thoughts. Best to all of you,

Steve