Why Exchange is still better than Zimbra: A response from a Bauer-Power reader

A few months ago I re-posted an article that the Slothman over at AskTheAdmin wrote. It was on the relatively new open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Zimbra. Friday I brought that article to the top, and that sparked an interesting rebuttal from Bauer-Power reader William Lefkovics.

Instead of keeping his ideas secluded in the comments section of that post, I though I would re-post his rebuttal here. Without further ado, here is William's rebuttal to the Slothman:

Wow. There is so much misinformation there, I don't know where to start. First, I love Zimbra (at least up until their sale to Yahoo! which still has lingering merger issues with Microsoft and AOL). I started with ZCS 3.0 and support 5.0 today.

The free version of Zimbra does not have all the features of the commercial Network version, and is not even a competitor to Exchange. The Network version of Zimbra is $35/user per year. It is a subscription license. If you run it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, also a subscription license, the costs compare to Exchange 2007 on Windows 2003 in about the 4th year.

Please explain how Microsoft Exchange is "notably vulnerable to attacks and viruses". I have never heard of an Exchange virus, but I have only been running Exchange for 10 years (and Zimbra for 2 1/2). It is a messaging system, so it will transport viruses through SMTP messages, just like Zimbra, Scalix, Cisco PostPath, OpenXChange, Axigen, Domino, Oracle Collaboration Suite, SendMail, etc without proper anti-virus mechanisms applied somewhere.

Exchange is not as scalable as other solutions? Ever try Zimbra with 1000 users with the Outlook connectors? Back in Exchange 2003, Korea.com has 6 million users with 150,000 users per Exchange Server (low concurrency and IMAP connected). Walmart, US Dept of Defense... hundreds of thousands of Exchange mailboxes. It is scalable.

1000 Zimbra users on an old box with 1 GB of RAM? Have you tried that? With the Network version with the Archiving module, Zimbra Mobile, Outlook connector, etc? Web administration is an option on many messaging solutions. They all tend to be limited. I actually use the Zimbra CLI over SSH rather than the slow, poorly designed Web admin UI.

Yes, Exchange is a beefy solution. It needs and uses resources. I am not sure why that is a bad thing. It doesn't take any more administrative effort than alternatives like Zimbra. They all require backups, reporting, user administration, etc.

Zimbra and Scalix are not, and never have been, "Exchange Killers". They are, however, Exchange competitors. They offer great alternatives to enterprises comfortable with administering messaging solutions on Linux. And they are solid products. And so is Exchange Server.

By William Lefkovics

Great feedback William! Does anyone have anything to add to William's ideas? Anyone disagree. I want to hear from you in the comments!

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Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Exchange

The following is taken from The Slothman, who is another guest writer over at Ask The Admin. The Slothman has his own blog called The Blog-o-Sloth, so please check it out. Slothman writes about a Linux e-mail suite that can do everything Exchange can do, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. The original post can be found here.

"I will make no bones about my disdain for Microsoft. I think their business ethics are an oxymoron. I think they make mediocre products by and large, and their focus is keeping you in the revolving door of addiction to their products, not making a quality product at a fair price.

My target today, is MS Exchange.

For the uninitiated, MS Exchange if Microsoft's mail server. It is pretty vanilla. It pretty much only does mail. And it is NOT cheap and the migration paths to newer versions are at times treacherous at best.

Exchange/Outlook makes up about 60% of the mail server/clients installed globally with Lotus/Domino taking up the vast majority of the remainder but that is changing as the Open Source Community has put a bullseye on Exchange to offer a more cost effective solution than Exchange. In fact in a recent Yankee Group Survey shows that 23% of respondents are looking to migrate away from Exchange.

You might ask, why I don't like Exchange. Here's the reasons why:

1. It is a Microsoft product
2. It is limited in functionality
3. It is expensive
4. It is notably vulnerable to attacks and viruses
5. It is a major TARGET of attacks and viruses
6. It is not as scalable as other solutions
7. It is a FAT application that requires a lot of hardware
   
8. It is a FAT application that requires a lot of manpower/time to support/maintain

But you may ask, "I don't want to have to have my end users learn a new client application" or "I like Outlook Web Access"

Great question....you don't have to and there are alternatives!

I want to introduce you all to Zimbra

Zimbra is an open source mail server. It can be free or you can purchase a more robust version with support for about $35/end user license. Compare that to Exchange!!!

What Zimbra offers you is the exact same functionality of Exchange with none of the drawbacks.

You can run Zimbra on an older, or cheaper Linux server with 1GB of RAM and that will support about 1000 users or so. It has plug ins for Outlook too which will make it seamless for you users to start using Zimbra mail, as well as it comes with a migration utility which will move your contacts, calendar, and email(including personal folders) over to Zimbra.

But there is more!!!! Zimbra is managed, very easily via a web console. So you don't have to be at your server or have SSH/VNC/RDP access to your server. Hit up a web address and you're in!

But what about OWA you ask??? Well....if they allow you to administer it via the web...then they must have a web client. If you figure that out, you're right! They have a rich AJAX based web client which gives you all the functionality of your Outlook client, but via the web and not like the 2003 OWA which is restricted as opposed to what is offered in Outlook.

Zimbra also has a built in wiki functionality and a document sharing functionality which I've read will be improved with time.

But you will ask about integration with applications such as Sharepoint and MS Office, or other apps...guess what, all those apps tie in to Outlook and don't care what is on the backend in most instances. So if you have Outlook, you're gold! While I have disdain for MS, Outlook is a great 'middleware' application as EVERYTHING hooks into it. Also Zimbra has the ability through its iCal standards compliant calendering system to be able to syndicate your calendar as well as pull in other syndicated calendars from say Google's Calendar.

I think I've bored you all enough right now, but I will leave you with a few ending thoughts.

1. Set up a test box to play with Zimbra or download a demo Zimbra appliance from VMWare
2. Check out the live demo on Zimbra's site
3. Scalix is also considered an 'exchange killer' server and is free as well(I did not like it as much as Zimbra)
4. When in doubt, check out Lotus/Domino. Platform independent and has a LOT more functionality over Exchange including native clustering, but you will miss a lot of the integration."

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