Three, Two, One….Zimbra

Asking a client to be a guinea pig is never easy. You can understand the reluctance particularly when it threatens the fundamental communication tool for their business. That said we’ve built an exceptional level of trust over the past 7 years and we came to an agreement to push forward with our proposal and so in December 2008 we saw our first Zimbra customer.

Moving an email system is not without risk but we carefully worked with the existing MS Exchange supplier to make the transfer as smooth as possible. Zimbra has a great MS Exchange migration tool and PST importer which helped significantly and as the data moved overnight the client woke to a new morning on a new system with most of the users unaware that the change had even taken place.

Inevitably as the morning progressed we get a few issues popping up. First one…where are my Outlook Notes? Huh? Outlook Notes….? Who on earth uses those? Well apparently the big boss of the client does. Oops and double oops we think as a quick search reveals that the Zimbra Outlook Connector doesn’t support notes! The team at Zimbra obviously has the same approach to Outlook Notes we do and it simply turns the notes folder into empty mail folders on import. Still not to be beaten at the first hurdle we devise a cunning plan of restoring them to Outlook as notes and using a simple Outlook backup plugin we secure their future…happy boss, happy us!

Lunchtime, all of the missed permissions during the transfer for shared calendars and inboxes are back in place and all seems well. Well until big snag no. 2! It seems that the Outlook integration with the client’s CRM is causing issues by locking the offline Zimbra mail file and causing Outlook to go blank. It only happens on 2 or 3 of the machines and NEVER in testing so we are a little confused. After a lot of digging around we discover that Outlook and the CRM talk to each other in a couple of different ways, one works (and in our opinion the correct way of doing things but we would say that wouldn’t we?) and the other doesn’t. Calm is restored and….relax.

And so the day passes and the next, so with very few issues the client is happy and so are we. Zimbra is an exciting product, easily the best alternative to MS Exchange in our humble opinion. Threatened a little by the Microsoft/Yahoo! takeover we really do hope that they sort the public license out for this as soon as possible to allow forks should the ‘bad thing’ happen. With exciting developments on the mobile edition, a Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and the best Ajax webmail client we’ve seen things are looking good for Zimbra.