the life and times of endenizen » Linux

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.

Waking up this morning kinda sucked. We stayed up till 2:30 and slept till 5:30, which means we got very little actual sleep. I pretended I was at some overseas conference and I was really tired because of the jet lag. As volunteers, Chris and I ran some cable around the floor into the different conference areas and hung around with the presenters. The actual conferences were pretty cool. I went to see Linux-based High Availability Infrastructures, Building an Open Source Company, Apache: mod_rewrite, Hula, and the best one, Deploying Open Source Software in Schools.

Now the presentations are done, the vendors have packed up and the real fun has started. Notacon is supposedly putting on a major party for all of the attendees with free drinks, loud music, and lots of other stuff.

I think I’ll go check it out.

After a long drive and several times getting horribly turned around cause we aren’t smart enough to read the directions, we finally made it down here safe and sound. We were a little late for the pre-party but we got to meet a few of the presenters for tomorrows big conference down here at the Columbus Ohio Convention Center.

Somehow I figured volunteering would be a good idea so now I have to be down at the coffee machine (not really sure where that is) tomorrow morning at 6am. I guess it’s more like today at 6am. So a little more than 4 hours from now. Oh well. I think I’m crimping cable and moving computers around. And I get a nifty badge and a t-shirt. Here’s Joe showing off the shirt:

And that’s about all I’ve got to say for now. I might post some later tomorrow but it’ll be a pretty busy day… so we’ll see.