So we got Zimbra installed. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a group collaboration and email suite. Their webmail is using AJAX and is pretty nice. They have shared calendaring, and will have shared folders & contacts. However, if I remember correctly you have to buy a license to get access to some of the collaboration tools. That’s OK though since there is a free version, which is the one we are running for testing right now.
I do have some comments though. There needs to be an IMAP/user account migration tool, so you can migration your existing users over. Luckily I was able to find a tool in their forums called imapsync which did a great job of moving over emails. The draw back is you have to know the users email password to do so. Not very secure, but I guess you could setup a webpage so that users could run it themselves.
Anyways, I would love to get our company a license, but I’m a little wary since Zimbra is still in beta, and many features worth paying for are not implemented. It would be nice if they offered pricing on their site, and also a discount for early adopters. I’d sign up if they could offer a lifetime discount for migrating to their software before it’s gold. Especially since I have to pay our sysadmin to trouble shoot anything that goes wrong, including with the software install (which did happen.)