Yahoo! is on the verge of selling its Microsoft Exchange–battling Zimbra unit to VMware, according to a report citing multiple sources "close to the situation." AllThingsDigital reports that Yahoo! and VMware will announced a Zimbra deal "soon," but it says the Zimbra price tag is "unclear." A Yahoo! spokesman declined to …

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 00:43 GMT Anonymous Coward

No surprises

As a Y! employee, I'd be happy to see Zimbra sold to anyone; as usual Y! screwed up the acquisition and failed to use or integrate the technology in any meaningful form. I actually participated in the internal corporate trial...which was working OK until it was canned without explanation and little notice in favour of...Exchange. Pathetic that the world's largest email provider cannot manage it's own calendaring, even when it's handed to them on a plate

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 04:28 GMT Neoc

Using it at home.

I admit I set up a PC using parts I had lying around and installed Zimbra (open source) on it. And it works pretty well - integrates with Thunderbird as an IMAP server, has its own desktop client, and does the web-mail thing rather nicely using AJAx and HTML (and even has a cut-down version for mobiles).

There's a few problems I'd like to see fixed with the HTML version, and there could be better integration with external mail servers (it is there, but only in the AJAX version), but on the whole, it works well as a mail server (and the SPAM/HAM filtering works well).

HOWEVER. One thing I really wanted was the ability to sync my contacts/calendar with my phone - and this functionality is only available in the Enterprise edition. I'm sorry, but I won't pay enterprise prices for what I essentially use as a home mail server. (as for FUNAMBOL, it installs and runs but the Zimbra plug-in keeps on complaining about Java class version problems, even though I compiled both on the same PC)

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 09:55 GMT Victor 2

Interesting if true

VMware knows it's virtualization lead will soon be commodity with Microsoft's, FOSS XenServer and Oracle's offerings, hence they will have to direct efforts in building up a complete stack to stay competitive.. which they have been doing so very effectively so far.

Together with EMC and Cisco, they cover hardware, vSphere for virtualization needs, Spring Source as the (Java EE) application framework, Hyperic for monitoring and Zimbra would fit as an app offering... Maybe the first of many?

Truly interesting to see these developments, this year will be full with competition between VMware/Cisco/EMC, Oracle/Sun, Microsoft and IBM... Wonder what will happen with the likes of Red Hat, SAP and Novell.. buy or be bought...

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 10:29 GMT Jay Jaffa

And it dosn't work well on Chrome

You've got to use the basic client interface when Chrome is your browser. Shame ..

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 15:02 GMT Marcus 8

Thank god

I dont think anybody could do a worse job than yahoo, and it would be nice to see it sold to a company that specializes in VM's so they could package it as one and roll it out making it even easier to setup than what I had to go through. Seriously downgrade perl by 1version just to make it work? Come on...

The support was also lacking, people often citing the wrong version of the OS used, thats not help thats just a cop out... just imagine if Apache, PHP, Perl, Java or any major application vendor saying such a thing.

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Tuesday 5th January 2010 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward

not my favorite company

Ah, ye olde Zimbra ... the company that helped themselves to all sorts of existing open source components (Cyrus, MySQL, various Java pieces, Postfix, etc. etc.) and wrote a little mail server on top of it. Then they pretend to "give back" to the community by offering a feature-crippled version of their software as a free version.

Really, there's nothing that Zimbra does that couldn't be accomplished using TRULY FREE OPEN SOURCE software. The perennial favorite seems to be Citadel, but there's also Roundcube, Kolab, Horde, etc. Some of these are really easy to install and more flexible too.

Kudos to Yahoo for unloading the Zimbra albatross while they can still get something for it.

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1. Wednesday 6th January 2010 01:31 GMT Fred Flintstone
  
  Nope - it works.
  
  Zimbra works, I use the Enterprise version which supports the kind of ActiveSync clients I used to need Outlook for - I can sync an iPhone for Calendar, Contacts and via IMAP/SMTP do the usual email work (all SSL encrypted to server).
  
  I've tried various things, but I haven't come across anything else that completely replaces Exchange to support mobile use as well as web use with calendaring and contact sync. I'd be happy to hear of alternatives that don't want the whole box (or VM) for themselves.
  
  Maybe that's why VMware is interested - a box with Zimbra is pretty much exclusively in use for Zimbra, in a VM you can do a bit more with that same hardware..
  
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 17:08 GMT Anonymous Coward

Yahoo?

Is Yahoo still around?

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