Zimbra: Getting Things Done Slowly

Zimbra is an e-mail provider that has created a buzz for sometime. It’s one of the new innovations that were under fire and praise at the same time. The reason: it’s one of the few e-mail applications that you can run in your computer at anytime using the power of Ajax.

That means it’s one of those e-mail program that runs in a powerful Ajax technology. When properly implemented, it can be used for business, government institutions and other corporate enterprises. It’s a bold step for this company as implementing very complicated software for company.

When you visit the website online, you can give yourself a test run of the program they are offering. Using a demo account, I was able to check some of the dummy e-mails. There’s also a functionality that I can search from my desktop. Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia and other search engines is on my desktop.

The downside is that I have to deal with a new page every time I click on search. If you don’t want to deal with many pages at the same time, its best that you have to you go to your preferred browser before you do anything else. On the other hand, the e-mail capability of Zimbra is remarkable.

If you think Google can only think of these things. Think again. With Yahoo Mail functionality that’s still on Beta, Gmail is miles ahead in their e-mail interactivity. However, Zimbra was able to create something Gmail-like that is well appreciated by most users. You can easily configure the e-mail yourself with the POP3 technology, much like that of Gmail. But the interface is not like those of Gmail. It’s more of an Outlook Type interface – a really familiar look making it really easy to navigate for most users.

Unfortunately, Zimbra is not a free technology. After all, we have to help these developers as they create something rather complicated without anything on their name. That may be a major block but it’s being packaged as a complete software technology for business. There are even discounts if government services purchase or use this software.

The good thing about it is that you can try them out for free using their open source version. It could even be tricked into something better if you can access the coding of the system. On the other hand, here’s a direct quote from the company’s website: “We're often asked if you can install the Network Edition Trial first and then revert to the Open Source Edition later if you decide not to subscribe.

The answer is absolutely - all your email data, etc. will be left intact plus you get the added benefit of support from the Zimbra team for the life of the Trial.” That mean’s you can try out the trial edition before you go ahead and work on the open source. I suspect that you could see some slight difference but it could take some major decoding before you can get a suite that’s the same with the technology they have implemented.