gtuhl: startup IT and software development

I posted a short while back about excitement surrounding a migration from Exchange 2003 to Zimbra for our company. The migration has had its ups and downs and now that it has happened and I have had a couple weeks to dig in as both a user and administrator I would like to share our experience.

The general takeaways are that Zimbra isn’t perfect. It does some things worse than Exchange and some things better but the balance, in my opinion, slants heavily in Zimbra’s favor. I’ll break it up into migration and then administration/usage.

The Migration

The migration was a bruiser. It involved a couple nights of failed attempts and then a brutal 6pm - 4am effort to get everything finished well enough to go to sleep. I had a sysadmin helping me that knew his stuff so the details of how to complete it aren’t here (he handled most of the work), just the headaches I saw. The issues included:

• The bulk migration tool was not able to migrate calendars.
• The individual .pst importing tool also was not able to migrate the calendars. It would just fail like crazy and then give up because the error count was too high. For users with 2k+ appointments the migration would fail after only a few dozen events. I eventually got these calendars over by doing .pst exports/imports with Outlook itself rather than trying to use server-side migration tools.
• We had to run the bulk migration over 2 nights because it took a long time. This isn’t a huge surprise because we had 100’s of 1000’s of emails, events, and contacts to migrate but the issue is that the second run re-imported everything imported in the first batch despite settings to the contrary. This essentially created duplicates of all emails and contacts.

To remove the duplicates of emails I used a perl script found at this page (this script actually worked fantastic). For contacts I used the Zimbra CLI to bulk clear the applicable address books and used client apps to re-import cleanly.

Administration/Usage

Zimbra started to shine after the migration ordeal. We immediately had all of our OSX users sync’ing their iCal, Apple Mail, and Address Book apps with the server, I had most of the Outlook users on the Zimbra Outlook connector without much effort, and most things worked well. There were a few issues I encountered.

• The Outlook connector worked flawlessly in XP Pro but was very difficult to install in Vista. You need to follow the tip here and then just keep trying until it works. If it doesn’t work remove the program and try again. I really hate Vista and the fact that it makes things so hard.
• The activesync with Windows Mobile is pretty flaky. It fails often for no apparent reason. I settled on using IMAP for email and just sync’ing my contacts and calendar and this seems to work consistently. It was as if it was stumbling over the greater volume of items to sync when the email was part of it.
• I’m not real happy with the calendar sharing. Without admin intervention a user must share their calendar with each individual user and each of those individuals must login to the web interface to accept the share and see it. These notifications cannot be accepted in Mail/Outlook/Entourage or whatever else. Once these calendars are accepted though you can use almost any app you want as your calendar and that is nice.
• There are connector apps for almost everything, but many of them are not updated to the latest versions of their target apps and none of them are completely polished and perfect. The Outlook and OSX ones seem to be the best but those also are not without issues.

In general though Zimbra works pretty well. I have calendar and contacts sync’d with my laptop using the OSX sync services and also sync’d to my Windows Mobile phone using activesync - a setup that never would have been possible with Exchange (without Entourage, but Entourage sucks in my opinion).

There are shortcomings but as I have worked through various user issues I have discovered what I believe is Zimbra’s biggest strength - its openness and open source underpinnings. It is a huge, powerful piece of code and between the CLI and the REST API you can do almost anything as an admin. Now that I am getting the hang of it I have created a set of quick scripts to interact with the CLI for doing things like auto-mounting calendars shared with distribution groups (getting around the email acceptance bummer mentioned above). The REST API is great and documented a bit here. It is completely trivial to export people’s contacts or calendars and to constrain what is exported using different parameters using the REST API.

Another big advantage in Zimbra’s favor is the community is quite strong and helpful. They have a wiki, forums, and bugzilla all very active and open.

So this is a bit of a ramble, but overall I am exceptionally happy that we made this switch. Zimbra is not perfect but it is powerful and utterly open making it possible to find workarounds for almost anything and it helps that it runs on Linux as well.

Just got back from Startup Riot. I found it to be a lot of fun and I think it turned out really well. I met a lot of new people, reconnected with people I knew or had met during my Georgia Tech days, found out about several startups I had not previously heard of, got some resumes, and in general made a number of great new connections.

I personally wasn’t thrilled with my pitch but I suppose my pitching skills can be expected to have degraded after a year or so of heads down cranking instead of pitching. I stumbled twice due to tweaking the script and order of things right up until my slot and I somehow managed to run long despite my tendency to speak quickly in front of crowds and had to cut the last slide, the most important one, short.

In any case it was definitely worth attending. I thought the atmosphere was fantastic, the venue was ideal, and everyone was just there to talk, share, and connect. I didn’t get pitched by anyone but startups (no vendors, service providers, recruiters, or similar) which really was great and I think it changed the whole feel of the event. No dealing with high school girls peddling hosting plans they know nothing about as I have endured elsewhere.

Major props to Sanjay Parekh for putting it all together. The after party turned out wonderful as well. The rooftop deck (and office in general) of Nelson Mullins was pretty sick. Though I would have preferred to have a stout or porter to choose from there is absolutely nothing real to complain about.

Hopefully by the time the next one rolls around we’ll be able to assist as a sponsor.

We were talking about RSS and the various readers and problems with them at work so I thought I would share my method for managing.

I am the kind of person that hates having unread messages pile up in the RSS reader. News sites and very active blogs (like TechCrunch) post a lot and this volume combined with the fact that an RSS reader is a separate program or webpage you must stop everything to go and look at meant unread messages piled up. I would eventually give up and mark everything as read once the pile became too large. I also hate having to navigate to separate pages to get information and news. Keeping updated is distracting enough even with everything centralized in a reader.

Now I use Google Reader as the RSS reader. It still has the problem of being a separate webpage that must be kept open but I never actually look at my Google Reader account except to add new feeds. I am subscribed to 70ish blogs but I only subscribe to ones that post infrequently (no more than once a day on average, many are weekly). These are typically personal blogs but I have a few multi-author and company ones that are low volume in there as well covering everything from load balancers to what my friends are up to. If a blog doesn’t show all post content in its RSS feed I will not subscribe to it in Google Reader. I was pretty frustrated when the Freakonomics Blog moved to nytimes and stopped publishing full content in the feed.

Then I have an iGoogle homepage setup. This is a dashboard that you can see in place of the Google minimalistic standard. On this page I embed a Google Reader widget in the prime top left spot which allows me to catch the entries from all those blog subscriptions in Google Reader. Then for any high volume blogs or sites I want to keep up with but don’t care about reading every post I drop a widget specific to that site on the dashboard. This includes things like TechCrunch, Reuters, and PostgreSQL Planet. I also will put incomplete feed blogs like Freakonomics mentioned above here in the lower areas of the page. My iGoogle homepage looks like this at the moment:

You can have multiple tabs too, but I only create those temporarily for things. One example is while purchasing a new house several months back I had a tab full of mortgage rate trends, interest rate and market stories, etc so with one click I got all that information I wanted. I like to have all of the regular stuff on one page so I can scan it easily when I hit Google.

If a blog I am subscribed to with Google Reader is getting too chatty I will decide if it is worth keeping up with that volume. If it is it goes in the dashboard as its own widget (since I don’t have to keep up with them there, I just catch the posts that look interesting as they cycle through) and if not I just remove it. Now every time I go to Google (dozens of times a day probably to look things up) I get a peek at my RSS reader and all the headlines from other sources in a few seconds. I can read almost everything right there on iGoogle and it is easy to click through to the source site or source article for a closer look. Not all the widgets fit in the top of the page where I see them every time I visit Google but i’ll scroll down a few times a day to catch those.

I’ve found this to be very effective for me.