[ Thanks to Linux User &
Developer magazine for this link. ]
“Zimbra is the first enterprise-grade open source
alternative for Microsoft Exchange Server. Read on to find out how
to set up your own open source collaboration and email server and
finally wave goodbye to Microsoft Exchange“Email and collaboration servers are vital to any organisation,
whether small or medium in size. ‘Collaboration services’ is an
umbrella term used to refer to services which help people inside an
organisation to communication. These services include email,
calendars, chat etc. Traditionally organisations used to pay hefty
licence fees for Microsoft Exchange Server to enable these services
– not to mention the vendor lock and the ecosystem lock that
come as part of Exchange. Vendor lock means only Microsoft will be
able to support Exchange and it decides when the licence support
goes away. Ecosystem lock means it only runs on Windows servers and
the client support is partial towards Microsoft-based clients
only.“Meet Zimbra, an open source collaboration server which provides
support for services like email, calendars, wiki, web, instant
messaging etc. Zimbra Open Source Edition is completely free and
can even be compiled on your own if you like. Like many other open
source packages (such as Red Hat Linux), Zimbra also maintains
commercial versions of its software with extra features such as
Microsoft Outlook support, iPhone sync support, clustering and
high-availability support, and technical support. This tutorial
covers Zimbra Open Source Edition.”