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.

We have a few Vista licenses at the office, primarily for use as VMs (though that is unnecessary now). With a new person starting last week we needed to setup a new machine and decided to install Vista on a free desktop. The OS couldn’t be activated because the registration was already in use (as a VM) and I didn’t feel like walking down the street to buy another copy. Thankfully, there appeared to be an option to purchase a new license online and activate the OS all right there from the newly setup machine. It has been a really lame experience, and I’d recommend anyone that might consider the option avoid it.

First, we had to provide our used license key. After several failed inputs with nothing useful in the validation error message, we figured out that both the case and the dashes mattered in the alphanumeric string. This is awfully stupid, they could have at least adjusted it in Javascript (writing key.replace(”-”,”").toLowerCase() is HARD).

Secondly, the interface was pretty rough and the site appeared to be running on a used toaster. Constant refreshing and retrying was required to get all page elements to load and all form posts to go through.

Finally, when the order is done, and you can’t undo it, you are told that a key will be sent in 2 business days. How in the world could it possibly take 2 business days to email a string of text? Dell can build and ship a 3U disk array in about the same time. It didn’t matter because at this point it was too late, I couldn’t undo the order, and I was about to leave for a weekend bachelor beach trip so I just didn’t care. This was on Thursday.

Monday rolls around, no key, so I send a message along the lines of:

I am curious as to the hold up on my order.

The order number is ABCXYZ4712 and the order was placed on the morning of last Thursday. When I login to check the status it says “Issue with Order” but does not tell me what the issue is or how to resolve it. I also was never sent any message letting me know there was an issue with the order.

Does it really take this long to purchase a string of alphanumeric characters?

An auto response arrives letting me know they will respond within 1 full business day. The next day, no sign of a key or a response to my email so I send another along the lines of:

It has been a business day and I have heard nothing. My order is still marked as “Issue with order” and still does not tell me what the issue is. I am beginning to believe no one is even on the other end of this process. Is a human reading these e-mails or taking these orders?

To restate what I sent about already, the order number is ABCXYZ4712. It is a vista license. There is nothing to ship, and I expected the order to take minutes. I placed the order on Thursday of last week and have not received or heard a thing.

I received another auto response letting me know it would be a full business day before they got back to me. As of now I haven’t received a key or a response to either e-mail.

Damn this is frustrating, I don’t even know how to cancel the order. That link just refers you to the same unmanned email account.

I’ll have to dispute the charge on the card tomorrow and be done with it. It is just disappointing that a potentially very helpful and clean process (being able to seamlessly purchase and use more activations when you run out) is such an utter disaster.