Evaluating Campus Wide Messaging:
ZimbraTM Collaboration Suite &
Google Apps
Viral Kadakia (Zimbra)
Jim Layne (Unicon)
Ted Wisniewski (Plymouth State U)
Oct 2007

Zimbra Snapshot
Next-Generation Messaging and Collaboration
 Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Mobility, Web Documents/Wiki,
VoIP, RSS, Mash-ups, Search, Sharing, Web services, …
What Makes Us Different?
 Innovation – low TCO multi-tenant administration + rich productivity
 SaaS ready – multi-tenancy, delegated admin, commodity hardware
 Open Source – transparency, community, extensibility
 Compatibility – investment protection, flexibility, application integration
Market Validation:
 9M+ mailboxes: service providers, hosting providers, SMBs, EDU & Enterprise
 10,000+ customers served directly or through our partner network
Partners:
Awards:
2 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Integrated, Multi-Modal Messaging & Collaboration
Web 2.0
(Ajax, Mash-ups, RSS, …)
Rich communication
over Internet Integrated
Address book,
Calendaring
Diverse
Environments
Collaboration/
(Users, Devices,
Sharing
Geos)
Rich, Flexible, Low Cost,
Current
Messaging
Integrated Solution
Open source Message &
Solution
community Data Volume Growth
Search & Tagging
Increased Spam &
Virus attacks
IM/Presence & VoIP/SIP
Web Services & EAI
3 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Zimbra Adoption
Open Source Community Adoption
 300,000+ OSS downloads to date
 ~10,000 community members
 600-700 posts/day with 90% response rate
Customer Adoption
50%+ growth past six quarters

Deployed in 50+ countries around the world

Utilized by 12+ industry verticals

EDU deployments across groups, departments,

colleges, campus wide
4 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Example Zimbra Higher Ed Customers
• 200+ EDU Institutions
• Over 600,000 mailboxes
• Deployments in 10+ countries
• Several deployments 10,000+ mailboxes
5 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Zimbra for Education
 Broad Range of Rich Features - support faculty, staff,
alumni and students from a single solution
 Ajax web client supports email, calendar, contact
and shared documents
 Support for desktop clients on PCs (Outlook..), Macs
(Apple Desktop), Linux (Thunderbird..)
 Synchronization with broad range of mobile devices
 Choice – On premise & hosted options; easy to
administer, integrated spam & virus and hierarchical
storage management
 Control – institutions decide the user experience,
subscription to features, access via desktop apps or
mobile devices or ads (if anyone)
6 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Zimbra Client Support
Advanced Web Client (Ajax)
iPhone
iSync
or browser
Blackberry
Zimbra
Server Beta
zSync BES
Zimbra Sync
Standard Web Client (HTML) Standards (2H 2007)
XHTML
J2ME
iSync zSync zSync
IMAP, POP, iCal, RSS/Atom, CalDAV (beta)
MAPI
Symbian
Windows 5
Evolution (beta) Palm
Apple Desktop
Outlook 2003, 2007 Standards Clients
7 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Platform Architecture, Robustness & Scale
Zimbra Google
Comments
Solution Apps
• ZCS released in late 2005
Platform
• Google Apps for your Domain launched in Aug
Longevity 2006
• Architecture designed ground-up based on
Platform new-age/web 2.0 paradigm & trends
Architecture • Google Apps solution designed for consumers
and “fitted to work” for other users
 Google: brand name recognition with students
Brand
 Compelling free hosted offering for educational
Recognition institutions
 ZCS: Open Source, transparent features voting
process, open bugzilla & forums, no agenda
Platform  Web services and public APIs, standards
Openness support, easy integration with 3rd party apps
 Interoperability with Exchange or other
platforms
Deployment  Zimbra: On premise & hosted
Choice  Google Apps: Hosted
Key = Low = Medium = High
8 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Basic Messaging Feature Set
Zimbra Google
Comments
Solution Apps
Integrated
• Support for email, calendaring & contacts
Calendaring,
• ZCS also offers web mash-ups (Zimlets) based
Mail, Contacts, integration for improved productivity
Documents
• ZCS integrated with proven Spam Assassin &
Integrated ClamAV solutions
anti-abuse • Google Apps: Built in protection
• ZCS: Visual (advanced) search builder
Productivity • ZCS: Folders, tasks, delegated access,
features keyboard navigation
• ZCS: Zimlets, “Rich” HTML client access
• Web-based any place/any time access
• ZCS: Rich set of command-line tools, SOAP API
Admin Tools and web access
• ZCS: Multiple administrator roles/privileges
• ZCS: Windows Mobile devices, Palm Treo,
Mobile Symbian, Blackberry handsets
Devices • ZCS: iPhone (IMAP, Mobile Client via XHTML)
Support • J2ME native client (ZCS: coming soon)
Key = Low = Medium = High
9 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Next Gen Collaboration Feature Set
Zimbra Google
Comments
Solution Apps
• Single inbox, VoIP
Unified
• ZCS: Voicemail, call control & call bridging
Messaging • ZCS: Integrate with VoIP solution of choice
• Basic SOAP API for server access
Web Services • ZCS: Web services framework for access to a
variety of clients
Framework &
• ZCS: Web Mash-ups framework (Zimlets) to
Mash-ups integrate 3rd party apps like course &
document management systems, portal, ERP…
 Index & facilitate search of message subject,
body and limited attachment types (e.g. pdf)
Indexing &
 ZCS: Index, search and render in browser over
Search 200 different attachment types
 ZCS: Syntactic & visual search options
Integrated IM  Built-in Instant Messaging, cross-application
& Presence presence (XMPP) and Web documents
 ZCS: Share mail, calendar and address book
Sharing & folders with internal users
Collaboration  ZCS: Share folders with external users or make
them public
Key = Low = Medium = High
10 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Multi-Modal Access
Zimbra Google
Comments
Solution Apps
• Zimbra Native MAPI Service Provider
Outlook
• Email, contacts, calendaring, tasks
support (PC) • Outlook cached mode & delegated access
Apple Mail, • ZCS: Supports Apple Mail, Address Book, iCal,
iCal, iPhone via IMAP and iSync as well as Sync Services
• ZCS: CalDAV support (beta)
(Mac)
Web clients  IE, Firefox, Safari, Firefox
support  All platforms (Mac, PC, Linux)
Standards-
 Google: POP3, ICS, CSV, vCARD
based  ZCS: IMAP4, RSS/Atom, REST, CalDAV (beta)
protocols (All)
Web Offline
 Zimbra Desktop (Offline Web Access)
access (All)
Key = Low = Medium = High
11 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Strategy & Business Model Alignment
Zimbra Google
Comments
Solution Apps
• Privacy International: “Worst on the web for
privacy”
User Privacy • User profiling to display “relevant” ads in the
future
• Google: Complete control over end-user
Control over experience
End-user • Limited branding for your domain
Experience
 Google: Requires legal means to release user
Administrative information to appropriate authorities
Control  No “system level” access, monitoring or
reporting
 Google: Longer-term strategy is based on ad
Monetization monetization
alternatives  Messaging solution is a cost center and loss
leader
 ZCS Open vs Google Closed source
Exit Option  ZCS: Multiple open standards access options
 ZCS: Standards based storage mechanisms
Key = Low = Medium = High
12 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Native MAPI Provider
Microsoft Outlook • Native MAPI Service
Provider; ZCS server
replaces Exchange and
offers additional
enhancements
• Cached Mode (offline,
including GAL)
• Delegation+
• Contacts, Calendar, Mail,
Exchange MAPI Provider
Zimbra MAPI Provider
Tasks
• Outlook 2003 now
• Outlook 2007 beta available
Exchange Server
Zimbra Server
13 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Unifying Users’ Communication Needs
14 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Unifying Users’ Communication Needs
15 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Unifying Users’ Communication Needs
16 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Web based Cross-Mailbox Discovery
17 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Unicon
Open Source Services
for Education
Jim Layne
Vice President Marketing
www.unicon.net
October, 2007

Unicon – The Open Source Services Company
 Services and Support for the Online Campus
 Sakai and uPortal Commercial Affiliate
 Zimbra VAR
 Domain expertise
 Higher Education
 Online Campus Development
 Technology solutions
Enterprise Portal

Learning Management

Web Content Management

eMail and Collaboration

19 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Implementation Planning

Project Planning and Assessment

Installation/Configuration

Branding

Training

Custom Development /

Integration
 Hosting Services
 Sakai and uPortal Support
20 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

21 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

 Enterprise
Messaging
Capabilities
Checklist
22 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Case Study
Plymouth State University
Zimbra Implementation
Ted Wisniewski
Systems Group Manager
Information Technology Services

Plymouth State University (located in Plymouth, New Hampshire) is a co-

educational, residential university (www.plymouth.edu)
Email accounts (~36,200)

11,000 Student

1,200 Faculty and Staff

24,000+ Alumni

The hardware

Dual Quad core Dell PE 2950

16GB RAM

1TB (usable) Raid 10 Disk

~36,000 users

Specifics to our configuration

RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.x

We use only secure protocols (IMAPS, POP3S & HTTPS)

Use Spamhaus RBL’s to limit the amount of SPAM actually landing here for processing

Use our own black-list to supplement Spamhaus (implemented at the postfix MTA

level)
 Custom perl script looks for “bad hosts/subnets” from the maillog for further
investigation.
24 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Old Configuration:
• Infrastructure:
• Four Email servers (one Alumni, two for Staff and Students, and one
Authenticated SMTP server)
• Network attached storage
• University of Washington IMAP/POP3
• Sendmail with custom delivery script
• Horde IMP web based client
• Mail quota shared with personal storage space (network drive)
• Mail stored in mbox format
• Disk Quotas 300MB for students, 500MB for staff, 50MB for Alumni
25 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

The problem:
Email:
• Network attached storage speeds limited to network speeds
• Large quotas led to large mailboxes
• mbox format mail folders required large amounts of data to be
processed (ie. Pulled over the network)in order to manipulate a
single message
• Large mailbox folders of a relatively small number of people had
an adverse impact on all
• Old web based mail client was not universally liked by all
Calendar:
• Current tool was not flexible enough
• Sync to Outlook and PDA’s was problematic
• Web interface lacked intuitive features
26 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

The options:

Continue with our existing system

MS Exchange

Postpath

Google

Ironmail

The factors we considered:

Cost

Locally hosted vs. remotely hosted

Scalable, but not hardware heavy

Web based

Had an integrated calendar

Needed to be easy to manage

Support available included or at a reasonable cost

Integrate with our existing campus infrastructure

Needed to be one system for everyone

Mobile device support (PDA/Treo/etc..)

27 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

The shakeout:
 Ironmail was far too expensive for our needs
 Exchange, based on others’ experiences was too costly in terms of
licensing, hardware and personnel time
 Postpath had promise, but was clearly not ready for primetime
28 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

This left three options:
 Our existing system – Since we were experiencing scalability problems,
this was not a first choice.
 Google – Many pluses, web based, has calendar, has documents
 Zimbra – Many pluses, web based, has calendar, has documents (beta)
29 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

The choice: After meeting with student leaders and other campus
constituents, we chose Zimbra over Google:
 Discomfort with something we have traditionally owned being outsourced
 Possibility of sensitive data being archived and stored outside of something we
had direct control over
 Security, by default Google allows you to access Mail, Calendar and Documents
over unsecured web connections
 Allowed a relatively seamless migration from our old system to new for
administrative users (they could continue using Outlook, Thunderbird or
Applemail on the desktop just like before, no changes)
30 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

The timeline was very aggressive (this is after we chose Zimbra):
Project begin: May 31st 2007
•
Identify hardware needs: June 1st
•
Implement test environment: June 15th
•
Create and test methodology for migrating user data: June 30th
•
Formal communication to users: July 10th
•
Install new server: July 13th
•
Configure application: July 11th
•
Migrate user data: July 27th – 29th
•
Project end: August 15th 2007
•
* This portion of the project was to just replace the underlying
infrastructure; No attempt was made to implement the Outlook
connector due to time constraints.
31 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Lessons learned:
 We underestimated the time it would take to migrate data
 Our original plan was implement on VMware for DR capabilities
Vmware only saw ½ of the Processing power (4 virtual CPS vs. the full 8)

High I/O wait and CPU load as a result

Our needs not ideal for a Vmware installation

Move to bare metal after one week

32 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Support:
Zimbra support

Helped us through our re-install, even though the problems we had were not Zimbra

related
Ongoing support has been timely

Support technicians follow up to make sure everything is all working

Normally, I am skeptical on using commercial products because my past

support experience has been less than satisfying.
“Zimbra provided excellent customer service and support throughout

the whole process”.
33 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Other accomplishments:

Integrated Single-Sign-On to SCT Luminis portal using CAS

Portal channel showing quota usage and first few message subject/sender/size/date (SOAP

API)
Portal channel showing month and entries for today (Beta) (SOAP API)

Next steps:

Zimbra Outlook connector

34 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Zimbra Creates New Sources of Value
Zimbra Collaboration Suite – Value Drivers
Innovation Collaboration Choice & Control Integration
Zimbra offers
Innovative Web 2.0- Zimlets-based
Collaborative customers choice of
based features and integration with
experience on-premise or
multi-modal access partner systems
accessible to users hosted offerings.
options provide a improves faculty,
anyplace, anytime
unified students and staff
that store user data End-users enjoy
communication productivity and
in the cloud reduces seamless experience
experience to end- end-user experience
support costs
users Administrators avail
of 100% control of
the Zimbra system
35 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Summary
 Free 60-day Free Network Edition Trial
http://www.zimbra.com/products/download_network.html
 Request comparison whitepaper of ZCS & Google Apps
http://www.zimbra.com/about/contact_us_form.html
 Browse through ZCS Documentation
http://www.zimbra.com/products/documentation.html
 Join the Zimbra Forums http://www.zimbra.com/forums
 Meet us at Educause
Zimbra: Booth 2707 Unicon: Booth 542
 Questions or Comments
Zimbra: sales@zimbra.com vkadakia@zimbra.com
Unicon: sales@unicon.net jlayne@unicon.net
36 Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 Zimbra, Inc.

Thank you!
Zimbra, Inc.
1500 Fashion Island Blvd
Suite 100
San Mateo, CA 94404
sales@zimbra.com