Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Zimbra is the answer for cross-platform email and calendar

September 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Zimbra is the answer for cross-platform email and calendar

TAGS: Applications

As I have mentioned before, shared calendaring on the Mac has been a burden to say the least. Our problem from a business perspective was that we had no way to share calendars and schedule events across multiple time zones.

Very rarely am I rewarded for my status as a Tier 3 blogger and open source monkey-lord but today was a glorious exception as I was visited by Scott, the Mac/Zimbra Ace.

The story goes like this: We tried Zimbra 3.x previously and the core product worked fine, but the sync client was a little unpredictable. In terms of the web client there are a few minor things you need to get used to but its pretty shocking how quickly you forget you are in a browser. But the sync client was a real drag--it got a little wacky if you killed the sync while in process-something about Mac SyncServices needing to be killed manually.

Thanks to my previous nagging we got shortlisted by the Zimbra crew to work out the issues with the beta sync. Also, our pals over at Maccius upgraded to Zimbra 4 and the Z-team just finished the .9.16 release of the iSync plugin. Verdict: It works!

One key feature that Scott just built in is a progress bar during the sync, which tells you exactly what stage of the process you are in. It makes it much easier to determine root problems and is a general user nicety.

The moral of the story is that Zimbra went from being almost great to being really great and we are really pleased. Go out and get some Zimbra for yourself.

Thanks to Kevin H, Scott, Scott and Satish for helping us out. A side note to this is that these guys are willing to go way out of their way to make a great product and help their users. Not that I expect this to go wrong (hah) but if it does I am sure they will fly into action.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 14, 2006 09:03 PM

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