The problem with Zimbra
Zimba is the full open source “collaboration” suite (email…calendar…) though it really should be classified as a semantic application due to its “Documents” feature which allows you to create notebooks with “pages” (aka light weight web-pages) that you can easily drag and drop snippets of text into.
It is relatively easy to setup and run (I manage my own Zimbra server), and it is by far the best cross-browser web-mail experience — it is fast, and works for me not against me (I’m looking at you Yahoo Mail 2.0)
This all sounds well and good, what could be the problem you ask? Two things: 1) Java, and 2) It’s standalone nature.
The two together make it a real pain in general. Java imposes higher memory requirement (don’t even think about running it on a machine with 512M ram) and the fact that is is pre-integrated with postfix/spamassasin…and meant to be run as a standalone solution makes it very hard to run with other software. It assumes it is the only thing running and binds by default to port 80, and 443…etc.
What would be better would be a “componentized” version, meaning I already have postfix/mysql/spamassasin setup, and I want Zimbra for web-mail and shared calendering — drop a war into a tomcat webapps directory and presto, you have a great web-mail package.
My Current solution is just to run Xen and give it its own instance…but when thinking about moving to shared hosting or a dedicated server it is…restricting to say the least.
I love Zimbra, I still use it… but keep this in mind if you are considering it.
Filed under: Semantic Web