Is it just for the paid versions?

[pss7]

bevore anouying community users..check out sour salesDB...I posted about 120 bug reports in 2005, so..I am sure I will not miss anything

Zarafa does the work, so no worry.

[Baylink]

Originally Posted by phoenix

You'll never know, will you?

They are rather silly and short sighted comments.

His phrasing might have been a bit weak, but indeed it's quite difficult to get a Real World test out of a new email system in a company of any size which has users who are *not* technical people.

The only way you can really do it is to put people onto it live, and let them use it... but if the decision is made *not* to switch, then you have the problem of migrating all their mail back to whatever you were using previously; it can be an administrative nightmare.

I'm in the middle of switching from Exchange 5.5 to Zimbra, in the free time I have available from the other things I do, and that's taken 6 months *so far*.

Luckily, we had a company spin-off, and that gave me a good clean-break point to use to get Zimbra under people's fingers, or it would have been even worse.

And if you're doing it underneath MCO...

It's easy to *say* that it's easy to test out a new mail service, or even switch to one -- but IMEO, anyone who says that has never done it in a production business environment. I've been administering email most of my 25 years in this business, and switchovers have never been easy, unless they've been preceded by catastrophic failures.

[ewilen]

Hm, I don't think a live test of new email system ought to be too terribly hard. To migrate back to the old system, you've got imapsync, simple folder copy using IMAP/MAPI clients, emailchemy.

The real blocker is interoperability of scheduling systems during the test period. Exchange/Zimbra ought to be okay, but the documentation for peering Zimbra with other systems is lacking. Without interoperability, the test group either has to manage parallel schedules--a very hard sell--or the whole organization is inconvenienced.

As for the main topic, if I'm not mistaken, Zimbra can't give away the ZCO because it's based on 3rd party licensed code. Maybe someday OpenChange or the Open Outlook Connector will offer a way for Zimbra or a 3rd party developer to provide a FOSS approach, but I'm not sure how close either of those projects is to maturity.

I hope, though, that the ZCO isn't being sold at much over the marginal cost of maintaining/supporting it. IMO it's as much of a "promotional bridge" to get organizations over the fear factor of switching from Exchange to NE as it is a product in itself. (Note: speculation on my part; I assume Zimbra knows their business.)

[Baylink]

> Hm, I don't think a live test of new email system ought to be too terribly hard.

You are speculating; I'm speaking from experience, this having been the third time I've done it.

And you're right, it wouldn't be hard -- except for all those pesky *users*...

[ewilen]

Well, let me put it this way. I believe I had an effective approach laid out recently; you may be right that it would have been a mess, but the dealbreaker was calendaring.