Comparing Vmware Zimbra with Leading Email and Collaboration Platforms
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Comparing VMware Zimbra with Leading Email and Collaboration Platforms ZIMBRA COMPETITIVE WHITE PAPER Comparing VMware Zimbra with Leading Email and Collaboration Platforms Introduction Email is indispensable—few applications are more critical to the success of a small or midsize business. From its origins as a communications tool, email has become the de facto archive of business information at many companies, and serves as a platform for messaging, coordination, and collaboration almost everywhere. And the evolution of email is far from over • Functionality—user expectations for consistent, near-effortless email experience are high, and user- interface preferences are strong • Platforms—from its established base on business servers, email is leading the move to virtualization, mobile devices, and the cloud • Devices—every new “must-have” desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet supports email, creating an unending series of support challenges Rising user expectations constantly run into business barriers of solution cost and administration time. As support contracts expire for some popular legacy email solutions, many businesses are looking for alternatives. Framing the Choice Email used to be easy: most businesses used Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook clients; most schools and nonprofits used Novell GroupWise. Both are solid, premise-based solutions, but both have struggled to accommodate the proliferation of new devices and the move to virtualization and the cloud. Cloud-native Google Apps has struggled in the opposite direction, to deliver trustworthy business value from its base online. Where an application sits and who owns it are important considerations. But users, administrators, and business managers care more about the value an email solution delivers in comparison to the resources it consumes—on-premises, online, or on the go. Considered on the basis of business value for time and money, there’s a compelling case to be made for VMware Zimbra—an open solution that offers a consistent, feature- rich user experience deployed on onsite physical or virtual servers or in the cloud. Selection Criteria Consistent User Experience Users are more productive when their email operates consistently and intuitively online and off, regardless of the operating system (OS), user client, or browser they choose. Inconsistent, platform-dependent modes of operation generate delays, errors, and support calls, and reduce user satisfaction. Yet inconsistency is the hallmark of most email solutions. Novell GroupWise offers RSS feeds and group calendars only on its Windows client, and its Web interface doesn’t even support mail sorting. Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA) lacks many productivity plug-ins available for Outlook. Basic elements like tasks, reminders, and HTML composition are available only with OWA Premium, which is not even offered for Safari on Windows or Google Chrome on non-Windows platforms. Used offline, Gmail lacks even drag-and-drop and folders—driving many users to adopt a third-party client for offline use, which increases support costs. Wireless access, virtualization, and cloud computing are creating a continuous global computing environment in which users will expect consistency of operation and features from critical applications. Zimbra email has it now, with a Desktop client that works the same online or off, and a Web client that matches it feature for feature across Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux clients. And Zimbra gives confirmed Outlook users full support of their favorite client, with no loss of major functionality. Device Support Industry analysts confirm what casual observers see in any office or coffee shop: device diversity is on the rise. But alliances and competition among manufacturers, network operators, and software providers is creating a patchwork of limits, barriers, and incompatibilities. Novell GroupWise offers cross-platform mobile synchronization only with a maintenance contract. Microsoft Outlook workflow is different on the Mac, and many of its features are missing. Google Sync can archive but not delete email from Apple devices. And every new device adds complexity. WHITE PAPER / 2 Comparing VMware Zimbra with Leading Email and Collaboration Platforms The Zimbra commitment to open standards extends across third-party email clients that support IMAP, POP, CardDAV, CalDAV, and Apple’s iSync, including iPhone, Android, Windows, and Blackberry smartphones. And VMware extends that commitment through close collaborative relationships with hardware, OS, application software and network providers across the industry. Extensibility Extensibility of business applications requires much more than downloadable business-oriented apps—users and administrators need plug-ins and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for integration to Web services and custom or third-party enterprise applications, so users can work from whichever device or platform meets their requirements. But poor applications integration limits the productivity of most email solutions. Novell GroupWise lacks a full set of web-service APIs, with many plug-ins available only for their Windows client. Microsoft Outlook offers a rich set of APIs and plug-ins, but many—including plug-ins for Salesforce.com—are unavailable in its Web version, and may be incompatible with plug-ins many users add to their Outlook desktop clients. Google Apps documents, spreadsheets, and gadgets work differently from the Microsoft Office solutions users know and depend on and lack file compatibility and many features users expect. The Zimbra desktop client, Web client, and administration interface can be extended by application “Zimlets” that are broadly compatible across platforms for easy extension, integration, and customization. A core set of Zimlets is included with the client; many more can be downloaded from the Zimlet Gallery, or created for integration with company- or industry-standard databases, applications, and productivity tools. Deployment and Scalability The promise of virtualization and cloud computing includes fast, flexible deployment and scalability to meet spikes in demand or the challenge of rapid growth. But email solutions with roots in physical infrastructure can be difficult to virtualize and scale. For example, Novell GroupWise requires the purchase of an expensive File Management Suite to optimize storage in large-scale deployments. Microsoft Exchange offers High Availability (HA) for the Exchange mailbox but not for the entire application in environments that distribute server roles. And this feature is Exchange-specific: extension of HA to SharePoint and other collaboration platforms requires a separate solution. Google Apps introduced user policy management—a key feature for large deployments—very recently, but it still lacks the ability to set different policies and configuration settings for different domains that may require different permissions or degrees of protection. And because Google Apps offers no on-premises deployment option, organizations need to rely on Google policies and practices for security, privacy, and availability—making it a non-starter for organizations in sensitive industries, or those exposed to political and social risks. Zimbra—proven in production environments across 110 countries, offers a choice of on-premises deployment with integrated hierarchical storage management—or a solution hosted through one of many VMware vCloud Service Provider partners. Zimbra also provides a software virtual appliance, built on VMware vSphere, that deploys in less than 10 minutes, offers a simplified administrative interface, and combines its application and operating system under a single lifecycle management policy to reduce maintenance burdens. The Zimbra collaboration virtual appliance uses the vSphere platform to deliver integrated high availability, backup, and disaster recovery into a true business solution. Administration and Support The cost and complexity of maintaining an email system has risen steadily with the growth of email volume, and as organizations rely on their email systems to support communications, collaboration, and integration with a growing array of business applications. Virtualization and cloud computing offer a path to reduce the operational and administrative costs of email, but legacy email systems are seldom up to the task. Novell GroupWise is an expensive solution built on an aging, hard-to-maintain architecture. Microsoft Exchange is renowned for its proprietary, single-platform focus, and high administrative and operational costs, even with the improvements built into Exchange 2010. Google Apps offers no option for organizations to move away from a hosted model as their requirements grow—client organizations must take a leap of faith that Google’s business model will remain aligned to their needs, or plan for a difficult future migration to a business-ready in-house solution. WHITE PAPER / 3 Comparing VMware Zimbra with Leading Email and Collaboration Platforms Zimbra email is designed to work smoothly across major hardware, OS, virtualization, and cloud platforms, and with both packaged applications and hosted web services. Secure, extensible, scalable, and future- prepared, Zimbra is an open, manageable solution counted on by millions of users, companies, and service providers around the world. Backed by the resources and support of VMware and its partner organizations, Zimbra represents a confident choice. About