[nylug-talk] The future of Zimbra after Microsoft's bid for Yahoo!

[George Bourozikas]

[lots of snipping]
On Monday 04 February 2008 13:35:58 Ruben Safir wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 01:23:55PM -0500, Ron Guerin wrote:
> > Ron Guerin wrote:
> > > Kevin Mark wrote:
> > > When it comes to stuff like this, the license is almost beside the 
> > > point.  If not developed by a company paying developers, it won't be 
> > > developed at all.  One thing you've never seen, and aren't likely to 
> > > ever see, are community developers hard at work on groupware that's 
> > > actually useful to anyone.  
> > I'm snarky before my caffeine.  I really don't mean to take potshots at 
> > whatever's out there, which may be useful to people.  But, for all of 
> > the faults in the Outlook/Exchange implementation, the model is very 
> > popular.  
> 
> Eh - its sold in preinstalled packages with glossing pamphlets.
> There is 
> nothing truly good about the Outlook/Exchange implementation but most
> buyers are simply braindead.
> 
> > Geeks may have trouble understanding it, but all consultants 
> > know when you show someone a mail program, one of the first questions 
> > they're going to ask is "does it do shared calendars?"  Telling them 
> > you've got some external or web app that does shared calendars pretty 
> > much drains the excitement out of the conversation.

I mostly agree with the above.  I would argue that buyers are not "braindead" 
per se but they want to get a job done.  For better or for worse, Exchange 
gets the job done.  It's not elegant and it's a resource hog (human and 
machine) but it offers features that people ask for.

I think that licensing is important but corporate sponsorship is even more so.  
There is not much geek appeal to this kind of project, GPL'ed or not.  Kolab?  
Open-Xchange anyone?  Compiz has much more geek appeal even if it's not all 
that useful.

Paying for support is not the big problem here - one needs to get specialized 
support if their business depends on it.  But getting tied to a proprietary 
solution is a problem.

So I guess Zimbra probably won't be the solution I've been looking for.  For 
now I will continue to recommend hosted Exchange to my clients who need this 
kind of functionality.  (Last I looked into it Kolab and Open-Xchange didn't 
quite cut it.)

--george