Any K12 Users?

[carelessarcher]

Hi All,

I'd be interested to hear from anybody who's using Zimbra in a K12 school environment. I've inherited a situation where 1/2 of my school district is on a hosted Communigate mail server and the other 1/2 is on a locally maintained Groupwise server. Not optimal, to say the least. Moving everybody to Zimbra looks like a good solution for various reasons like be able to retain global address books from Groupwise, etc. Also, it seems usable for facilities scheduling (Who's using the gym two weeks from Friday?).

Anybody been down this road before?

[jholder]

I have walked that path. . .

When I arrived at our district, we didnt' have a website. . . Regular DOS attacks on our internal router, and everyone had hotmail accounts.

Zimbra has been wonderful. A few staff members have used the outlook client, and have found the Zimbra web UI very useful.

Probably the best thing about it, is not a single cent goes to M$.

And e-mail I received from a staff member:
----- Original Message -----
From: Cathy Jxxxx <cjxxxx@tombstone.k12.az.us>
To: jholder@tombstone.k12.az.us
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2006 8:51:49 AM
Subject: E-mail

John,
I just wanted to take a moment and tell you how pleased we are to have you. I have heard many staff members remark at how much you have accomplished in such a short amount of time.
We love the e-mail and keep up the good work!

Cathy

[mubley]

A local K-12 school had Exchange 5.5 for internal mail, hosted POP3 for external mail, and a mix of Outlook 98-2003 on the client side. Most users had Outlook 2000 which didn't support Exchange and POP3 in the same profile, so they used Outlook for their internal mail and their webhost's webmail for their external mail. Needless to say, having two mail accounts and two different mail interfaces is neither productive nor intuitive.

I installed a Zimbra server to replace the internal Exchange server and configured fetchmail to pull all mail from the external POP3 server. Users now have one mailbox and one mail interface. Additionally, they get all of the extra features that Zimbra provides over Exchange. This saves the school time and money and makes the teachers and staff that much more efficient.