Help getting started

[tigerknight]

Let me explain the setup first, I suppose. I am the IT admin for a small neurology office. Up until now the the focus has been on getting the EMR software and other core functions of daily operations going. Now that that is fairly stable and ready for growth, the other parts of the office could use some attention. One of those is email/calendar/etc collaboration at the office. In looking around for an alternative to native (and expensive) exchange, I ran across a reference to Zimbra.

Currently at the office there is a Windows Server 2003 domain controller that manages: roaming profiles and directory redirection, DHCP, DNS, network shares, printing and faxes.

Zimbra looks promising because it has all the collaboration functions that are missing without exchange, and if I understand correctly it is able to act as a server for native outlook clients. My main curiosity is if it can communicate with the domain controller for accounts to manage or if they would have to be added manually.

If it can do this, I would really like to give it a try because it looks like a very promising project - I just don't know where to start. There are no linux boxes in the environment, but I have vmware on the domain controller that could host something of this nature.

Looking at the download page, there are lots of deprecated platforms - which should I look towards as a best fit for something to manage maybe 25 users/mailboxes/calendars in a server 2003 environment?

I appreciate anyone's time in helping me get this directive off the ground for my office.

[phoenix]

Welcome to the forums.

The Outlook Connector is a feature of the Network Edition of Zimbra and that's a paid-for version, it's not available in the Open Source version although you can connect to a ZCS server with Outlook via IMAP or use the Zimbra Desktop.

If you are keeping the Windows server then Zimbra can use that as an external authentication for the users but you will still need to create the user account in Zimbra. There are a couple of scripts in the forums that will create the users from the AD server but with only 25 users it's probably just as quick to manually create them. There's also a migration wizard in Zimbra that will create the Zimbra users from the AD server but it is the initial release and still needs some work on it.

You will also need to keep the passwords in ZCS an AD synchronised manually (there's an RFE to make this automatic) but again, there's a script in the forums to do it on a regular basis.

The supported platforms are the ones on the Download page for ZCS, if you're going with the NE version then I'd recommend RHEL and for the Open Source version I'd suggest CentOS (it's a binary compatible rebuild of RHEL and free ) - operating system choice is always a hot topic in Linux and I'm sure you'll get more advice about that. You will need a 64bit hardware as Zimbra will only be available for 64bit systems after the current ZCS 7 version.

[tigerknight]

Welcome to the forums.

The Outlook Connector is a feature of the Network Edition of Zimbra and that's a paid-for version, it's not available in the Open Source version although you can connect to a ZCS server with Outlook via IMAP or use the Zimbra Desktop.

If you are keeping the Windows server then Zimbra can use that as an external authentication for the users but you will still need to create the user account in Zimbra. There are a couple of scripts in the forums that will create the users from the AD server but with only 25 users it's probably just as quick to manually create them. There's also a migration wizard in Zimbra that will create the Zimbra users from the AD server but it is the initial release and still needs some work on it.

You will also need to keep the passwords in ZCS an AD synchronised manually (there's an RFE to make this automatic) but again, there's a script in the forums to do it on a regular basis.

The supported platforms are the ones on the Download page for ZCS, if you're going with the NE version then I'd recommend RHEL and for the Open Source version I'd suggest CentOS (it's a binary compatible rebuild of RHEL and free ) - operating system choice is always a hot topic in Linux and I'm sure you'll get more advice about that. You will need a 64bit hardware as Zimbra will only be available for 64bit systems after the current ZCS 7 version.

Thank you very much, that was pretty much the kind of detail I was looking for. One other thing popped up that I had not noticed when I went to look at pricing of the network edition - the 10-user free VM appliance license. Does that have the AD integration that we mentioned earlier? From the description on the order page, it looks like the only thing missing is zimbra-mobile functionality - but which parts, just smartphone capabilities or the whole mobile thing (such as web interface)?

That seems like it might be a decent way to give zimbra a test run, anyway.