Monday, September 26, 2005

eWeek Touts Exchange Alternative The eWeek website today is spotlighting a new open source alternative messaging environment from Zimbra. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is now in beta (for Red Hat and Fedora), and wants to solve the problem of corporate email. Taking a sort of GMail-meets-Thunderbird approach (while using the JavaScript-updated-for-the-new-century technique called AJAX), Zimbra wants to make it easy to search your email, identify contacts, and build a calendar--all in your Inbox (where you live, anyway, right?). The article cites at least one shop that chose Zimbra over Novell's OpenExchange Server, so this could be a sales threat to both OpenExchange and the Hula corporate email project that Novell launched several months ago. Having just seen their Flash demo, they certainly have some interesting ideas. I will certainly admit to salivating over the ease of setting up calendar items and contacts they're talking about. Proof, of course, will be in the testing. Oh, and about that name. Perhaps I wasn't the only one who, upon hearing the name, wondered if the Talking Heads had anything to do with them. It took a little digging, but I found a blog post at the site that confiirmed the theory. It's an interesting post, and I heartily concur with the recommendations contained therein. I will see if I can get the source to compile on SUSE 10, and report any worthwhile findings. 11:12:46 PM    comment []