Small Office Zimbra installation on mac

[Trilogy]

I would like to get some feedback from some current users on Zimbra using mac (in particular mac mini). I want to migrate our company to Zimbra and avoid moving to exchange. We need about 15 accounts at first, and I do not see this growing beyond 30-40 ever. I need the collaborative tools (calender&contacts) and integration with a largely outlook based client side.

So is the mac mini a viable solution? I read the panic bug report, but don't have a way to translate that into a real effect for our deploy. Is anyone using a mini succesfully out there? IF so, how many users. We would probably just opt for the Network Professional Edition, for outlook integration.

As well, we have a switchvox (asterisk) PBX at our site, but our Zimbra would be hosted at a remote site. Can we easily integrate the two?

I'm not an expert network admin, but I have the task of solving the problem none the less. Any advice would be helpful. I looked at hosted solutions, they just fall out of what we want to budget for this project.

help me from going with exchange.

thanks to everyone in advance for your help.

[gmsmith]

Originally Posted by Trilogy

I would like to get some feedback from some current users on Zimbra using mac (in particular mac mini). I want to migrate our company to Zimbra and avoid moving to exchange. We need about 15 accounts at first, and I do not see this growing beyond 30-40 ever. I need the collaborative tools (calender&contacts) and integration with a largely outlook based client side.

So is the mac mini a viable solution? I read the panic bug report, but don't have a way to translate that into a real effect for our deploy. Is anyone using a mini succesfully out there? IF so, how many users. We would probably just opt for the Network Professional Edition, for outlook integration.

As well, we have a switchvox (asterisk) PBX at our site, but our Zimbra would be hosted at a remote site. Can we easily integrate the two?

I'm not an expert network admin, but I have the task of solving the problem none the less. Any advice would be helpful. I looked at hosted solutions, they just fall out of what we want to budget for this project.

help me from going with exchange.

thanks to everyone in advance for your help.

We run a few Mac Minis with development installs of Zimbra, but not really something I would do in a production environment. Could you do it for a small office with a low mail volume, probably on the Intel mini with a couple gigs of ram, would I do it in a production environment where my business communications rely on that piece of hardware, no I wouldn't

The Asterisk Zimlet should work just fine with Switchvox, since it is Asterisk under the nice gui. I haven't tested things with the latest build of Switchvox (Nov 15 release), so I can't promise compatibility, but I wouldn't expect an issue.

Have you thought about having your e-mail hosted by one of the hosting partners (http://www.zimbra.com/partners/hosting_partners.html), might be worth looking into.

Greg