Located in Wisconsin’s largest city, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) serves as academic home to nearly 30,000 graduate and undergraduate students and an employer to more than 3,500 full-time staff and faculty. Formed in 1955 by a merger between the existing University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee, UWM encompasses 12 schools and colleges, and offers 156 degree programs.

Building community among students, faculty and staff is a key objective for most universities. And technology—in the form of email, calendaring, messaging, and collaboration solutions—has become an essential tool in achieving that objective. At the turn of the century, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) realized it was outgrowing its communications infrastructure, and in 2004, the IT team began planning for the vital task of replacing its aging and disparate email and calendar systems.

With its requirements defined, UWM embarked on a lengthy selection process that involved sending requests for proposals to virtually every vendor in the email and collaboration software business. In the end, UWM received proposals from five vendors—Microsoft, IBM, Sun, CommuniGate, and Zimbra—but the Zimbra solution quickly rose to the top of the list.

The No. 1 reason: the low total cost of ownership (TCO) while meeting all requirements. Said Maas, “We focused on the TCO—that is, the lifetime cost, not just the purchase cost of the application—and Zimbra emerged as the consensus choice.” Indeed Zimbra’s own studies show its TCO to be 20 percent to 30 percent lower than that of Microsoft Exchange, according to Ramesh May, senior manager of marketing and products for Zimbra.

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Texas A&M University is a world-renown research institution founded in 1876 and has the distinction of being Texas’ first public institution of higher learning. On its sprawling 5,000 acre campus are 48,000-plus students, grad students and a nationally recognized faculty.

Like many higher institutions, the Texas A&M students, faculty and staff are now quite tech-savvy, having been exposed to full-featured consumer e-mail and collaboration services. Pressure had been mounting for some time to migrate off their legacy Sendmail platform as quickly as possible to provide new services capable of advanced email and collaboration. After thoroughly investigating Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps they chose Zimbra.

The decision was taken to use a short window after the Fall semester to migrate all 80,000 mailboxes and more than 22 million messages in the mailstore. From initial installation and testing of the Zimbra software and migration tools, to final production cutover and migration the project spanned three weeks with only 12 hours of downtime. The campus now enjoys email, calendaring, mobility and as well as Zimlets that integrate Twitter, Flickr, iCal and custom RSS feeds into Zimbra. In 2008 Texas A&M received the Campus Technology Innovator Award.

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Argonne National Laboratory is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers and is also the nation's first national laboratory, chartered in 1946. The laboratory has about 2,800 employees spread across 24 siloed organizations.

The lab had been trying to find ways to consolidate IT resources duplicated amongst the various organizations so they could invest more of their grant money in research. Over time the divisions, with a diverse set of constituents, had come to run incompatible IT applications, most notably resulting in lack of shared calendars.

The Computing and Information Systems (CIS) division led an effort to unify the divisions by employing a unique hybrid communication platform to satisfy the two constituent profiles: those currently running Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and those who preferred web-based Exchange alternatives. Their solution was to run a split Zimbra-Exchange deployment, and leverages Zimbra compatibility with Active Directory and Exchange. Zimbra gives the entire lab one directory solution, global address list, shared room resources and the ability for users to see each other’s schedules between Zimbra and Exchange.

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ZipRealty, Inc. is a pioneer in online real estate, providing home sellers and buyers with an innovative real estate solution using the efficiencies of the Internet to streamline the real estate process. ZipRealty has over 2,500 real estate agents spread out across 14 major metropolitan areas.

The heart of Zip’s technology is a home-grown CRM system for managing real estate transactions. Zip has built a simple open source email interface but was faced with significant challenges to add collaboration and mobility features. Real estate agents toggled between their email and CRM app, and had to manually input a lot of information (such as appointments) between the two.

After investigating Google Apps, Zip Realty selected Zimbra because it offered more enterprise features and open source technology which lent it well to integrating with their internal CRM. Now Zip’s agents are able to have shared calendars, mobility on Windows Smartphones and single sign-on between Zimbra and their CRM. They have also created Zimlet mash-ups which make it easy to get appointment data sent by customers from their website into Zimbra (via their CRM).

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Food for the Hungry is a Christian international relief and development organization that meets the physical and spiritual needs of those less fortunate. What started out as one man’s vision in 1971 has grown into a world-class organization with more than 2,000 staff members, who walk alongside the poor in more than 29 countries.

After 37 years, the Food for the Hungry staff was operating in nearly all 24 time zones and operated 7 independent mail servers worldwide. The core user base was operating on Exchange 2003 but satellite offices were developing their own solutions due to time/complexity challenges, which resulted in fragmentation (no unified GAL, no scheduling, lack of easy backup and restore). They needed an overhaul quickly because efficient communication is critical to the effectiveness of their mission.

After testing Exchange 2007, Scalix and eGroupware Food for the Hungry selected Zimbra as their worldwide solution. An early sign of success was almost immediately 40% of their users opted to switch from Outlook to the Zimbra web experience full time for its superior portability and collaboration features. Administration has been greatly improved with a robust web admin console, simplified backups and a highly scalable deployment enabling server consolidation to one primary datacenter. Food for the Hungry also uses Zimlets to integrate with their child sponsorship database directly in email.

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