Licensing/Migration

[aceinc]

I have successfully installed OS Zimbra, and it seems to work

Two of the features that I want to use are Branding and Domain level administration. This brings up a couple of questions;

1) The license fee appears to be for a specific period of time. Does Zimbra die, or do I lose features if I don't pay up? Or do I just lose the ability to call support and get new versions? (I read a cost comparison of Zimbra vs Exchange, and after 3 years Exchange was cheaper)

2) As I mentioned I have OS Zimbra installed and two domains ported to it, if I want to upgrade to Standard Edition (I think that has the features I need) is their a simple migration path, or will I need to reconfigure everything?


We run a small ISP and due to competion from folks like yahoo can realistically charge $2 per month per user account, from that we need to pay for our overhead, and Zimbra at $1.50 per user per month (standard Edition pricing, $2.33 for professional), this leaves somewhere between $0 and a loss per e-mail user we support.

There has got to be a better way.


Paul

[gmsmith]

Depending on your license count, you may want to contact Zimbra about HSP (hosting solutions provider) option. Or you may want to work with an existing HSP to get everything up and running.

To answer your questions, licenses are yearly, if the license expires, you lose the NE features. You can upgrade or downgrade pretty easily basically by installing NE over OSS and adding the license file.

[aceinc]

I was afraid of that. Since the licensing is not perpetual, Zimbra really is not a product that can work for us. If I wanted an HSP I would have been looking for one.

I read a few other posts about the pricing and I guess they are right. Y'all need to do what you think is right for your company and nothing I say will affect that, but charging between $1.50 and $2.33 per mailbox per month is not a business model that makes sense for us, and is certainly not a threat to M$ Exchange.

The only thing I wish is that I hadn't wasted my time on Zimbra.

Paul