Zimbra Offers Great Alternative for Microsoft Exchange

I’ve been a huge fan of Microsoft Exchange ever since I’ve been involved in managing email servers.  Exchange has been a topic of several of my posts this year because let’s face it, Exchange is the 100 lb gorilla of mail servers and has been for some time.  But I’ve seen a fair number of colleges using a new mail system from Zimbra so I thought it was my duty to try it out.  After all, there is a free 60 day trial of a VMware appliance available so what did I have to lose?

The installation was very simple.  Go to the Zimbra free trial site and enter the obligatory contact information to retrieve your installation bits and trial license.  The installation comes in either a server edition or a VMware OVF file.  I chose the OVF file for my VMware home lab since it was easy 🙂

After I downloaded and deployed the OVF file there was a very simple setup process.  I took the IP Address of the appliance and threw it in my favorite web browser with the 5480 port added.  Enter in the username: root and password: vmware.

The install gives you some options based on scalability.  I only wanted to try it out so I picked the single server option.  But, if you were deploying this for a larger environment, the components could be split up.

Enter a hostname, IP Address, a new password (not vmware) and your domain.

Then point the configuration at your license.  You should receive a trial license if you’ve gone through the Zimbra website.

You’ll see a variety of things happening in the background.  Grab a cup of coffee and wait for the setup to finish.  I will mention that I did have an issue with this process the first time I went through it and found that I needed to be sure to have an A record and an MX record setup to point to the appliance before this step.

When the setup finishes, you can go to the admin console to setup some users, mailboxes, email addresses etc.  Be sure to log in with your new password, and not the default vmware password.

I found the admin portal to be very intuitive.  There are sections to add accounts, administrators, aliases, email addresses, distribution groups and seemed to be much cleaner than the Exchange interfaces I’ve been accustomed to.

When you’re all done setting up users, you can go to the https:// address of the appliance to get your webmail.

A very clean look for sending emails.

The webclient has folders, search folders, a preview pane and search functions.

For those of you that aren’t super excited about a webclient, zimbra desktop is a thick client that can be installed on your machine much like Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re looking to deploy an on premises mail server (as opposed to a SAAS option like Office 365 or Google Apps) and aren’t satisfied with the old standby of Microsoft Exchange, check out Zimbra.  If you’re still not convinced, show the pricing to your CIO and let him decide.   It’s a pretty decent alternative and the pricing may just make better sense for your organization.