Standalone outlook connector

[mintra]

Hi

I am just cincerned with the small buisness version. If one assumes that the customer
changes their email system every 3 years (in practice may of my customers leave it five years) This means Zimbra is end user price £2500.

I did a speadsheet (I do not have it here) and I put in 5 10 15 20 etc up and then put prices for OEM small buisness edition (this includes Windows 2003 and SQL).

I know that Zimbra was more expensive for all the smaller number of users however I seem to remember that it was more for 50 users. I will email the spreadsheet.

It is difficult to do trade costs as I have not got these for Zimbra. At the other end we would need to compare costs with Microsofts OSL (open subscritption Licence or whatever it is now called) I have not checked that.

What is worse is that many of my clients in the health and education sector get very high discounts.

With respect to functionality it is shared calendars, then contacts and integration with PDF that is all they want.

[kevindods]

Hi Mintra

Sorry for butting in and I guess this is sort of off topic but follows the thread.

Our clients have similar needs, we costed real use of Zimbra Network against Exchange 2003 and also came up with Zimbra Network being more expensive over expected terms. Infact larger volumes didnt swing it to Zimbra over 3-5 years. There is 'currently' less functionality in Zimbra, no mobile sync, no shared calendars, no shared contacts and no tasks, no public folders etc. I know lots has been promised but I cant sell on a future promise, not in software that's for sure! :-) There is far too much that clients would expect to work when coming from Exchange that doesn't. Esp in the connector, eg Calendars imports etc.

Having said all that I think Zimbra has a lot of potential and could be very useful in moving users from standard IMAP and POP3 accounts and improving them. Thats were we are starting from and as Zimbra grows we hope it can deliver more to the upper end of the market. Unfortunately we cant help fund the development by buying just the network version as it isnt quite there yet but I am sure it will get there if the guys are able to continue the good work to date.

Tuppence worth given ;-)

Cheers,

Kevin

[nvidhive]

I really like Zimbra, but have run into a similar issue. I am trying to migrate our company off Exchange for cost reasons, and was hoping to use zimbra. However, group calendar and group contacts are a must for the users in the company... and unfortunately they do not seem willing to give up their precious Outlook. I did find that Scalix offers this for under 25 users for free.. any more, and you have to pay for their Enterprise version. Maybe this will help you. I on the other hand.. am going to attempt to get everyone off Outlook (since that will save more money as well) and get people here used to the web interface. I would be open to a per license price on the outlook connector as well, but if the boss people don't budge.. I am probably going to have to go with Scalix... which is closed source... not as feature rich... and definately not as pretty.

[KevinH]

Thanks for all your feedback, it's important to us. We enjoy hearing your suggestions and will take them into consideration going forward.

Shared Calendar
- First off Zimbra has shared calendar and delegated calendar. The one caveat to this is that for a calendar to be shared across the entire company/group you have to do a one-time share of this calendar. We are working on making this easier (ie at user create time).

Group Contacts
- Similar for this you can make this work today by putting those contacts in an LDAP server and configuring Zimbra to use this as an external GAL. It's something we'll also be making easier in the future.