Is Zimbra an Exchange replacement for email/calendar/contacts...?

[terribletrouble]

I was hoping it was, I am a totally - 100% Unix environment. The only Windows devices I manage, are Windows Mobile 6.1. Desktops are all Ubuntu, servers Ubuntu. Email clients are Evolution, browsing Firefox.

I got Zimbra up and running, and after quite some messing around, managed to get the Windows Mobile devices, using Active Sync - to connect to my Zimbra server. As this is all testing, it is a little tough to know just how robust everything is, but from the surface, it looks like it is working.

Next onto Evolution, the Evolution Connector, somewhat complicated to get it operational, but it is working, then onto the calendar configuration, and that does not work. In the forums, I have not seen post that says the calendar is operational, nor contacts for that matter. I tried caldev, webcal, they both just seem to hang my evolution.

I think that I have a simple and very common problem:
I need to have email + calendar + contacts synchronized between workstations and mobile devices, and I must have this data on a central server that I can backup and manage. Clearly, this is what Exchange does, but if you are a somewhat smaller shop, with fewer IT resources, you cannot actually afford to run Exchange with AD and so on... From all the ramblings I heard, Zimbra was the solution.

Right now, Welcome to ScheduleWorld is what we use. It provides all the synchronization needs across all platforms, and works well.

Does anyone have experiences with Zimbra where a similar solution is working for them (Unix and thick clients with WM). How is that working, anything specific to share. I just cannot resort to M$, and have been looking at the likes of google, etc..

tt

[gnu2tux]

In a word, the answer to your question is yes.

We use the Network Edition in our workplaces to cater for just short of 400 mailboxes. The end user either uses Outlook or the ZCS Web interface (which is brilliant btw) and they sync their calendars, contacts and mails onto devices like iPhone and Windows Mobile devices to take with them. It obviously does IMAP/POP3 as well as MAPI/WebDav.

The outlook connector integrates seamlessly with Outlook (you can't really tell it's there unless you look very hard), it is only available to paid network edition users, if you are not using the outlook then you will probably find the open free source edition good enough for what you need.

Hope this helps.