We had a bit of the same in terms of the OSX/iPhone/Linux/etc users (including myself) being delighted and the Outlook veterans being less impressed – and the two BB users we have still have issues (iPhone users have none). The BES connection stuff in Zimbra is most definitely a cludge.

I recently (10 days ago) migrated a customer’s 50 Exchange 2000 mailboxes from an aging Win 2000 server to ZCS Network Edition. We took a long, hard look at Exchange 2007 but wanted something that would be OS and browser agnostic.

We decided to use the Zimbra Exchange Migration Wizard and migrate only messages going back three months prior to the migration date. Everything else the users had to archive to Outlook PST files. This turned out to be the worst part of the exercise. The migration itself went well and took about 5 hours – drinking coffee at home and watching it happen via a VPN conection.

The more tech savvy users are delighted and happily synching up their iPhones, Macs, Linux desktops etc. A few, for whom email and Outlook are synonymous, are having a tougher time. I could not make the Zimbra Connector for BES work; it’s a cludge. So out BB users are hooked in via a simple Internet mail connection.

One user, who has 100% vision loss, is using Thunderbird. Her screen reading software could not cope with the Ajax web pages.

I’m now poking around the admin side of Zimbra and like what I see so far. No more worries like: Information Store bloat, or why third party Exchange backup software craps out or, if I kick a domain controller my email server will have a seizure.
Regards.

We migrated email and contacts with the bulk tool and restored calendars with PST imports in outlook.

To anyone else, we are using an Exchange host today, I would have to assume that a user creating, then importing their own PST into Zimbra desktop would avoid some of the migration issues?

Hopefully you guys are able to sort out the remaining issues, bummer on the bad experience thus far.

This is on the hosted site….

The issues at hand seem to be all related to the horrific migration tool. You would conclude that they never have done an exchange migrations before. I had to recommend Exmerge to them!!!!

We also keep finding bad things with the hosted environment. For instance, macs do not have access to the GAL. There also is no access to LDAP from the internet.

All in all this has been the worse migration I have been involved with and I have performed over 30 exchange migrations.

I would not have agreed to this as a solution, it was approved by upper management before I was hired.

I give Zimbra a large F!!!!

Mad Network Administrator.

It is going pretty well – glad we made the switch overall. Though, our environment is probably not typical, only 12 people and mostly all use macbooks and iphones. Sync with those works great and the caldav support through iCal against Zimbra is very good. Have 2 users on Outlook and that seems to work very well too.

We have 2 users on blackberries and they have more issues than everyone else combined. You still need the blackberry server and make it talk to Zimbra with a couple cludges and their calendars just don’t seem to stay in sync. I suspect it is something Zimbra support can resolve (there are deployments with lots of BB users supposedly) but simply haven’t had time to gather the relevant logs and file a proper ticket.

Upgrades are smooth, have received reasonable assistance when have filed support tickets (had an issue with fs.file-max setting in my OS not sticking so Zimbra would run out of file handles and stop delivering messages), and overall I just really like being able to admin a linux box running components that I understand (postfix, mysql, etc).

If you are a command line person the command line tools that come with Zimbra are pretty excellent, allows automation of just about anything.

In any case, generally a very positive experience but we do have a relatively small deployment here. Hope that helps.

Joe