[SOLVED] Scratching my head over Zimbra Pricing...

[Jbrabander]

Originally Posted by In_The_Ville

Personally, I would much rather type commands all day long than hunt through endless wizards and menus, but I'm not an MCSE anymore, so..................

Oh, I think using command line can be great for some things, I agree. (how many times have the old DOS commands saved us all?) I'd just prefer that both options be available.

[dwmtractor]

Originally Posted by Jbrabander

Well, the logs aren't available in GUI so far as I'm aware.

and they should be. Vote for the RFE in bugzilla and maybe they will some day. I see that although it's a two-year-old RFE it only had four votes till I just added my own. . . But in the meantime I either go to the command line or use Webmin for viewing the files and both work.

Originally Posted by Jbrabander

Junk folders are fine, so long as they work, and ours currently don't work right. (but that's another issue) I'm talking about things that hit the "spam" target number, not just the junk one.

You're right it's another issue, but this is one we CAN fix. If you like, open a new thread and we'll take a look at what's going wrong for you. Have you read the wiki article on improving the spam system? There are tons of suggestions there.

Specifically, if you're concerned about good mail hitting the "spam" target, just increase your "kill" percentage in the AS/AV GUI and the bar will be set higher for anything to be "killed." If your other settings are done right, it takes so many bad hits to get something truly killed that I have a hard time believing you'd have any legitimate mail wind up killed, but YMMV. Taking some time to understand the anti-spam system and tuning it to your needs should eliminate this particular problem, though. . .and if you need help, that's what we're here for!

The only thing that truly does not work vis-a-vis spam folders is the fact that dragging a message into or out of that folder from Outlook (or any IMAP client) does not re-classify the message according to the Bayesian filters. Several users have designed workarounds for this--none of them totally satisfactory, but my impression is that this issue is actually slated for an upcoming release (maybe the 5.5 series? I'm not sure). You can follow this issue in bugzilla too.

Yes, it's true, Zimbra is not all any of us want it to be. But I have watched it get better in the less-than-one-year I've been paying attention, and I've seen a lot of user-driven ideas addressed. Even if you wish, as I do, that your particular issues got addressed more quickly, I guarantee you won't see that level of responsiveness from the big groupware guys, whether it's Microsoft or Novell or Lotus or whoever else.

Now I'll climb down off of my soapbox. . .

[natrixgli]

The only reason I could see myself using Exchange would be if I had friends who worked in Microsoft tech support, and I wanted an excuse to talk to them more often.

Cheers,

-n8

[nicknick]

Apologies for dragging up an old thread but this is top of google for "zimbra pricing".

I felt I had to reply as this thread does zimbra little credit. They should concentrate on their strengths not use FUD arguments against microsoft. Time and again as I am searching for the relative merits of the two products the argument for zimbra boils down to "you should use it because we aren't microsoft". That might hold water on slashdot but in the real world money talks and zimbra, in the real world, costs more than exchange over a 5 year lifetime. I've no doubt it's a better product in most respects but most users have done without the extra features to date and so will put little value on them.

I hope that Zimbra understand their target market better than the posters here. *No-one* pays full retail price for MS licenses. MS realise that the 5-10 employee SMEs who are a large wedge of their customers cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars for software and have some not-so-visible schemes for locking them in at much lower prices: $299 for an action pack gets you ALL of MS's software with 10 cals. Zimbra's equivalent to the action pack is the OS version I guess (as $299 probably doesn't cover MS's costs) but there is nothing between it and paying $7-8k over 5 years.

I am evaluating zimbra (as itself, not as an alternative to exchange) and am generally pretty impressed. Having set up postfix/cyrus-sasl/SA/mysql systems in the past I'm impressed to see it done in one command and 10 minutes. I expected to have to spend a day solving dependencies. I will probably end up using the OS version and forgo the luxury of isync and iphone functionality. It is not worth $1500 a year to me. Were that a one off fee I probably would have got my wallet out already but $7k over 5 years does not sound so attractive.

I hope that vmware will reconsider the licensing strategy. I understand that any corp likes the easy recurring income annual licensing brings but it is not so attractive to customers. Perhaps an upfront fee plus a small service fee for updates etc plus then paid add-ons like mobile is a better model.

[natrixgli]

Originally Posted by natrixgli

The only reason I could see myself using Exchange would be if I had friends who worked in Microsoft tech support, and I wanted an excuse to talk to them more often.

Cheers,

-n8

For the sake of clarity, I want to point out that my comment was intended to illustrate the fact that I basically can ignore Zimbra once it's set up, which takes me less than 2 hours from bare metal and a good 1:1 copy of /opt/zimbra.

I am told this is far from true with Exchange. Heck, I spend more than two hours a month explaining to Exchange admins that "myserver.local" is not an acceptable server address to include in their SMTP headers. (since my Zimbra installs do DNS and SMTP header checks to avoid obvious spam.)

I do, however, wish that a la carte pricing was available for things like the various NE features such as backups, mobile sync, etc.

-n8