[brlug-general] Collaboration tools for Linux..

[Tim Fournet]

We host Zimbra for several customers, and have been for over a year now. 
Here are my biggest complaints with it:

   1. Lack of support for Shared Tasks - The current version lacks tasks
      support in the web interface, but basic support is there within
      Outlook. But this is changing in the next full release due very
      soon. This doesn't effect me so much as we rely on RT for task
      collaboration, but we have had complaints from customers.
   2. Lack of HTML signatures in the web client. In the current version,
      the automatic signatures in webmail are a text-only box. This is
      expected to be fixed soon too.
   3. Junk training (spamassassin) requires pressing the "Junk" button
      on the toolbar rather than just dragging the message to the Junk
      folder. I hear that they plan on fixing that as well.
   4. The Admin GUI isn't nearly as powerful as the command-line tools.
      Tasks like moving mailboxes between servers, advanced account
      administration, etc, still need to be done via command-line. This
      is fine for me, but makes it difficult to delegate tasks to others
      who aren't as comfortable in bash.
   5. Requires a dedicated server - don't try to run this on a server
      already running LAMP. It can be done, but it's not pretty
   6. Some configuration modifications aren't carried over during
      upgrades. If you hand-edit config files, your changes will be
      eaten on version updates. So, document your changes and be ready
      to re-apply them after an update. I ended up writing a script that
      I run post-upgrades to replace my hand-edits.
   7. The Outlook connector doesn't update itself. With each new Zimbra
      update, features and bugfixes happen to the Outlook connector as
      well. However, users have to re-download the .msi to get the
      benefit. Would be nice if the connector would detect updates on
      its own and install them.

There's my list of what I /don't/ like about Zimbra. I don't think any 
of these are showstoppers, but it's good information for someone who 
wants to try it out. To me the benefits (see zimbra.com for feature 
lists and demos) far outweigh the drawbacks.

The salesforce.com stuff looks very interesting. I'm starting to learn 
about salesforce and it's platform, and it looks like there are some 
interesting possibilities there for companies who build web apps and 
want to link them with any type of data source. I signed up for a 
salesforce demo, but haven't had the time to test out the integration 
with Zimbra yet. It does require API support in your salesforce.com 
account, though.

-Tim
 

Dustin Puryear wrote:
> After talking about Zimbra a bit, I did some more research:
>
> http://www.techevangelism.com/2007/05/30/linux-does-collaboration-almost/
>
> Zimbra integrates with Salesforce? Now that's nifty..
>
>