Microsoft Exchange problems
So a while ago at my work, "they" decided to move away from Zimbra and go with Microsoft Exchange. The main points that made them want to switch were: 1) the calendaring/booking conference rooms/scheduling/sharing calendars didn't work very well in Zimbra and is "known to work in Exchange", and 2) email and calendaring for a large organization just needs to work. Now- I must admit that this is my take on what has been going on, and I may be wrong here. But, with that- my experience with Exchange has really sucked. The points for moving to exchange are one-sided.
Exchange doesn't work well with free software. Exchange is designed to work with Outlook, and no other client is even considered important. They do claim to have IMAP support for other email clients, but Microsoft's IMAP seems to be unstable. It continually has problems freezing up. About 3-5 times per day the IMAP service on the Exchange server hangs and needs to be restarted! Lame! And so all Thunderbird users are stuck playing this "is my email working now?" game all the time.
The other thing is calendaring only works with Outlook clients. Exchange doesn't support iCal/WebDAV or any other open standard. So for calendaring we pretty much are forced to use the web interface for Exchange. And the web interface for Exchange has two versions- a full featured one that only works on IE, and then a crippled one that is served to all other browsers. LAME again! So all the "features" of switching to Exchange are really only features for Windows users who use Outlook and IE. If you use anything else, then your email and calendaring just got a whole lot worse!!
Zimbra did have some known bugs in their calendaring, especially in booking conference rooms for meetings. However, I believe the folks at Zimbra have been working on that for their next release. Email never was a problem with Zimbra for any user that I could tell- Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever.
But I'm not bitter.... yet.
Exchange doesn't work well with free software. Exchange is designed to work with Outlook, and no other client is even considered important. They do claim to have IMAP support for other email clients, but Microsoft's IMAP seems to be unstable. It continually has problems freezing up. About 3-5 times per day the IMAP service on the Exchange server hangs and needs to be restarted! Lame! And so all Thunderbird users are stuck playing this "is my email working now?" game all the time.
The other thing is calendaring only works with Outlook clients. Exchange doesn't support iCal/WebDAV or any other open standard. So for calendaring we pretty much are forced to use the web interface for Exchange. And the web interface for Exchange has two versions- a full featured one that only works on IE, and then a crippled one that is served to all other browsers. LAME again! So all the "features" of switching to Exchange are really only features for Windows users who use Outlook and IE. If you use anything else, then your email and calendaring just got a whole lot worse!!
Zimbra did have some known bugs in their calendaring, especially in booking conference rooms for meetings. However, I believe the folks at Zimbra have been working on that for their next release. Email never was a problem with Zimbra for any user that I could tell- Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever.
But I'm not bitter.... yet.
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