Thanks to an article in Linux Journal (I think) a few months ago, I discovered ZCS as a possible webmail/calendaring application. Since it’s a bit more than just webmail though, I’ll probably have to have a bit of a think about whether it’s the right way to go.
Ever since I moved the main server off Red Hat, I’ve not really had an effective VPN (I know, slack me). So when it comes to things like e-mail access, I’ve been using various webmail solutions. At the moment, I even find myself without one of those! So when Zimbra with all it’s Ajax goodness popped off the magazine pages at me, I jumped.
The trouble is that I have been at somewhat of a crossroads of late when it comes to the Crossed Wires system environment. Additional complexity is definitely not desirable, unless it comes with a really good ROI or leads to a possible future simplification. To that end, there are a couple of negatives to Zimbra: it appears to have its own mail infrastructure and its own LDAP, both of which we already have working stably, so unless it can work with existing instances I’d have to work out how to hook Zimbra’s into my own.
I should be fair and say that I got this impression after downloading and starting Zimbra’s pre-built VMware Appliance of the ZCS community build, based on FC4. So it might be that a standalone Zimbra install just uses your pre-existing daemons. Which leads me to the next point — Zimbra is not in Portage, and the only install doco I’ve found for it discusses setting up a Debian or Ubuntu chroot gaol and running Zimbra in that. Not a small amount of management overhead…
So if Zimbra does stay around, it will be as a virtual server using one of its supported distros rather than running natively somewhere (I suppose it could run natively on the CentOS Trixbox/VMware server, but it’s got enough to do).
On Zimbra, well, it’s sweet — as soon as I saw it I thought “I have to have this”. The Ajax interface looks really nice, and it seems to have all the function of a Thunderbird or Outlook Express killer. The fact that the same interface gets used regardless of hardware, OS or location is really nice.
Otherwise, I just get my digit out and do a VPN…
Crossed Wires 