the life and times of endenizen » Zimbra - Email and Calendaring - AJAXified

The development world has realized the true power of AJAX. With that, everyone wants to release the slickest, easiest, and most powerful online email and calendaring system… first. Once people find a good one and get used to it, chances are they won’t want to switch. Remember the launch of GMail and the mad rush to get an invitation? Well, now that everyone who wanted a GMail account has one (and 100 more invites to boot), it’ll be pretty darn tough for any competition to sprout up in the area. Yahoo is still beta-testing their new interface (which I hear is pretty neat) but who will want to switch email addresses *again* and update everyone in their address book *again*. If Google releases a calendar service, it would all but solidify their place on the top of free web-based email and calendar services. However, this is hardly the solution for the corporate environment.

Corporations need security. They need control. They need customizable in-house email servers. For the open-source community, you get to take your pick from a multitude of software packages. On Planet Microsoft, you get Exchange. Few have been able to stand up to the might of Exchange. Some businesses are even using 12-year-old installations because it’s worked *that* long. Of course, anyone who’s ever tried to get a Microsoft application to Play Well With Others knows that it’s a nightmare at worst, and an inconvenient, semi-working, mess at best.

Enter Zimbra.

The team behind Zimbra (Zimbra, Inc.) just released Beta 3 of their very popular corporate email and calendaring solution. Zimbra comes with everything: mail server, web server, db server, spam filters, and a web-based interface to rival Outlook on speed *and* features. I’ve been running a Zimbra server (the free open source edition rather than the network edition) for a couple weeks now and it’s been a vast improvement over the previous methods of trying to combine offline and online calendars or trying to sync Outlook between all the computers I use during the day.

The sentiment among some of my colleagues is that email clients don’t belong on the web. In some cases, I might have to agree with them. Zimbra is more than just a web-based email client though. If you’d prefer, you can set up your email the same way that you would with any other mail server. Still, if I need to check my email over the web and I’m given the choice, I’d choose Zimbra any day.