Zimbra Email and Collaboration System

There are a few common sticking points that block the use of Open Source email in a school. The first is Outlook integration and the second one is a desire by the users to have shared calendars and address books. While Outlook can work with POP and IMAP email systems -- which are both easy to find in the Open Source world -- there are frequently little problems. For example, the use of an IMAP email system does not prevent Outlook from prominently displaying its own inbox. So users will always wonder why they are not getting any email when the email is actually going into inbox under the newly created IMAP account further down the list.

A more significant problem has been that most email systems do not reproduce the additional features found in Outlook -- especially when combined with Microsoft's Exchange server. Zimbra brings the comparison between Open Source and Exchange back to an apples-to-apples basis. It has most the functionality of an Exchange-based system with a few additions of its own. There are both commercial and Open Source versions of Zimbra. Certainly, if you need something like Exchange, you should consider Zimbra.

T

Zimbra - Home: "Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology."