back to article VMware waves goodbye to Zimbra

VMware has offloaded Zimbra less than four years after buying the email-cum-collabware business unit from Yahoo! Terms are undisclosed. The buyer is Telligent, a developer of enterprise social software. It will merge its software into Zimbra, and the goal is to deliver a "unified social collaboration suite designed for the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The light dawns

    Proxad.net (free.fr) started offering zimbra as an alternative to their web based e-mail several months ago and you should read the adverse comments about it on the newsgroup - no one appears to be very happy where they have changed over. Since I don't use web-mail I haven't seen the problems but am left wondering what will happen now.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's a real shame.

    I've been using Zimbra for the past 4 years partly because it's a cheaper and IMO better alternative to exchange and partly because there isn't really much other enterprise e-mail software out there with 'real time' delivery.

    Since VMware brought it from Yahoo the project seems stalled. I can only hope now that Telligent ain't gonna make it more costly and bundle it with a load of stuff my company doesn't need.

    Seriously, why hasn't anyone else made a successful enterprise email server with real time capabilities and decent security options? I feel like emails have been stuck in the 90s forever.

    1. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: It's a real shame.

      Note I am in no way involved with the company, just a content (as in happy) user of the software: give Communigate Pro a look.

      Years ago I was a paying user, running it on Solaris in a SOHO environment. If you ran it without paying, the worst they did was a attach a little "you are running this on a free version of CGP" into emails. Nowadays, it's free with full functionality for up to 5 users with quite fair support pricing for higher numbers.

      It's a full enterprise communication suite, with email, IM, scheduling, VoIP(!), and a host of others that I don't even use in my little SOHO setup. Runs happily on any Linux distro I've thrown it on, also available on WIndows, IIRC. Very kind in its use of resources.

      Works like a charm with Outlook clients, if you need to, as it comes with MAPI adapters.

      I was going to use Zimbra but I had many of the concerns voices here, such as expected life of the product that was being bounced around like a hot potato. In addition the free version was crippled. Not the case with CGP.

  3. qzdave
    Terminator

    IBM

    Maybe it's too much sun scrambling my brains, but would this not have made a good acquisition for IBM? It's cheap enough, and would give them access to a lot more clients to sell its(surprisingly good) social-business solutions to, whilst watering down the negative connotations of Notes (for which most people are still discovering offers an achingly bad user experience).

    Arnie because convincing Notes to do any work is like trying to win a fight with him...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh

    Zimbra is an overloaded, bloated pile of software with too many moving parts and far too much difficulty for its simple role in life. Exchange is the same. Maybe a match between Microsoft & Zimbra would be more likely, since both seem to be lack relevance anymore anyway.

    Email has gone the way of the cloud. Most < 21 yr olds laugh at using email anyway. Sure, business needs it. But the fact is that every $100K+ IT System Administrator is going the way of the dodo with cloud computing and outsourced 3rd world country support anyway. They hold onto these outdated paradigms because their income and security depend on it. Just like those that used to shoe horses before the automobile became commonplace.

    If Zimbra really is going to have a future, those with their corporate proprietary hooks into it will let go and send it back to the open source community where it probably has some form of future. But if its success is tethered to the success of corporate email, I think its doomed.

  5. robhoward

    Email is still the number 1 collaboration tool

    When I started Telligent in 2004 we wanted to build a set of technologies that allowed people to collaborate together independent of the communication technology they wanted to use. Email was always a gap for us because building a scalable email platform is very, very difficult.

    We in fact were always pro-email as a collaboration tool even as the social business market (which we are in) evolved to declare email as being 'dead'.

    With the acquisition of Zimbra we now how a way to offer a complete end-to-end solution that cover the different ways people want to work. Traditional collaboration with the user experience and benefits of social business integrated together.

    It still amazes me that email has seen the least amount of innovation in the past 20 years. We're planning on changing that, all while providing a great cost-effective solution for businesses.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Email is still the number 1 collaboration tool

      It still amazes me that email has seen the least amount of innovation in the past 20 years. We're planning on changing that

      Hi Rob,

      What innovations do you think email needs? What are you looking to make it do?

      1. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

        Re: Email is still the number 1 collaboration tool

        I'm probably naive in saying that I had high hopes in Google Wave showing us what future communication could look like. RIP.

      2. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: Email is still the number 1 collaboration tool

        >What innovations do you think email needs?

        Well, there are features in X.400-88 that are still streets ahead of SMTP/POP3, so Rob is being kind when he says 20 years.

        Likewise extensions to better support highly distributed async workflows...

  6. Humpty McNumpty

    Jargon and buzzwords

    I looked at Zimbra a few times while dodging Exchange, it never quite pulled me in because the community version was too restricted and the professional version used to start a little too high up the pricing/users ladder. Zimbras new home does not look likely to improve that as it sells products us mortals don't know or believe we need.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No online mode

    The biggest problem we have had with Zimbra is that when using the Outlook connector there is no equivalent of Exchange online mode. Everything gets cached into a ZDB file (which is just a PST with a different extension). This is a killer in terminal server environments. We tried moving the ZDBs to a file server so we didn't have to cache them on each terminal server, but since they are PSTs they constantly break when accessed over the network. Until there is an online mode we can't deploy it in TS/VDI solutions.

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