By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
Maybe it’s the name (they said bra, heh heh) or maybe we use Outlook/Exchange so much in our corporate lives that contemplating a major change like this is just too much. But the folks at Zimbra are launching a whole new Outlook email/address book/calendaring program that is built in Ajax and actually looks pretty slick. It’s also free.
“The Zimbra Collaboration Suite provides support for email, contacts, and group calendaring, and consists of a server and client. The Zimbra Server supports existing desktop and wireless personal information management (PIM) clients via standard protocols like POP, IMAP, and iCalendar: for example, Outlook, Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, Evolution, Eudora, and Wireless IMAP. The Zimbra Client is AJAX-based—Asynchronous Javascript on the client with XML/SOAP-based communications to the Zimbra Server, and runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple desktops in Firefox and IE browsers.” Source: Zimbra
Our Take: We got a lot of buzz about OpenOffice vs. MS Office, so perhaps our open source guru David Johnston will take a crack at Zimbra. Meanwhile, you can play with a live online demo, download the source code and try it yourself, or just wait and see what David says when he’s kicked it around the block. I am thinking of adding it to my new laptop (more on that later.)
Would you Dump Outlook for an Open Source version from Zimbra?
Maybe it’s the name (they said bra, heh heh) or maybe we use Outlook/Exchange so much in our corporate lives that contemplating a major change like this is just too much. But the folks at Zimbra are launching a whole new Outlook email/address book/cal…
New open-source software is all well and good, but I think I’ll stick to Firefox’s little brother Thunderbird.
I played with Zimbra for about an hour.
As of today, I would not dump my Eudora + Now Contact/Now Up-to-Date.
This could be a golden opportunity for Yahoo, MSN, or Google to contribute to an open source project. Imagine 20 Yahoo engineers helping out on this and using it to replace their aging mail interface. Capitalism and cooperation aren’t mutually exclusive.
Nope won’t leave Outlook till there is something better that supports Exchange and even then it’ll be hard to beat. I personally love Outlook and who the hell wants to use POP3?? Having access to ALL your mail, ALL the time, no matter where you are in the world or what computer your on with pretty much every feature that you get on full Outlook and if you’re using RPC of HTTP then on Outlook it self is hard to beat.
moocower.blogspot.com
Whats Outlook? is it a mail program? if it is, theres this thing called Thunderbird….its really great! /sarcasm off
I would love an alternative to Outlook, but all of you talking about Thunderbird need to tell me how to connect that to my exchange mailbox. Until it can do that, Thunderbird is not a viable alternative.
Zimbra – Web/Ajax Based Outlook Application
Company: Zimbra
Founded: 2003
Location: San Mateo, CA
Overview
We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.
When you firs…
Thunderbird, I now see was a mere infatuation. I was in love with Firefox, so I thought Thunderbird was the answer to email. After a while, I didn’t like her any more. I told her to leave. You can throw as many extensions as you want, T-Bird just ISN’T as solid as FFox. Sorry. It’s not well-rounded. Sure, with one extension I can view what time it is in Yuposau, Bulgaria or whatever, but it JUST ISN’T what outlook offers, and the new calendar is just taking too long to come out. Sorry, I thought I was in love with you T-Bird, but I’m not, give me back the key to my apartment. Otherwise, I’ve been begging Dreamhost to offer Zimbra, no luck I’m afraid. Zimbra is solid, full featured, and much more accessible than something on desktop, or the lacking Squirrelmail that dreamhost currently offers. That’s just my $ 0.02….
I personally love Outlook and who the hell wants to use POP3?
I’m not a Microsoft lover, but…
I wouldn’t switch to Zimbra quite yet, because you will loose some functionality. Until Zimbra supports some of the basic functionality available in Outlook – like Private Appointments – and has an offline capability, I’ll stay with Outlook as my UI (albeit on top of Zimbra via the Zimbra/Outlook connector). For those of you thinking about dumping Outlook in favor of Zimbra, I’d suggest a side-by-side parallel test for a while to see if you can live with some of the functionality limitations.
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