This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Introducing Zimbra

End user interface									Meta-Data Store
								3p		MySQL
JavaScript	SOAP/HTTP(S)
browser				Zimbra server
application				(Zimbra Store)
										Message store
Administrator console				3p	Tomcat					File system

JavaScript		SOAP/HTTP(S)		Zimbra application runs
browser				inside of Tomcat
							Index store
application
				ClamAV anti-virus (outbound)
							Lucene
						3p
				User account data
				(LDAP)
	Microsoft					Attachment HTML conversion
3p				3p	OpenLDAP	3p
	Exchange
						3p	Verify
Option to import users				Option for Microsoft
from pre-existing				Active Directory
Exchange server				Server (AD) for auth			Backups
				and GAL
							To disk
			Mail routing
			(MTA)				Logging

*

Edge MTA

SMTP

3p

Postfix

Local

Syslog

Load balancing

“Redo” logs

Anti-virus & Anti-spam plug-ins

Inbound spam filtering

Monitoring

ClamAV anti-

Spamassassin anti-

(Zimbra SNMP)

3p

3p

virus (inbound)

spam (inbound)

*

Tools such as

swatch

3p

Third-party (proprietary)

3p

Third-party (open-source)

* Your choice of technologies

The Benefits of Zimbra

Now that we have had a chance to go over all of Zimbra's moving parts, it's time to discuss exactly why an organization would turn to Zimbra as its Collaboration and Messaging platform. We will divide the benefits into two parts, benefits for the enduser and benefits for the systems administrator.

For the end-user, Zimbra provides:

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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Chapter 1

Choice of Client—as discussed earlier, ZCS provides users with many choices when it comes to which client they could use. However, this is assuming the organization does not require the use of a particular client. To take advantage of all that ZCS has to offer, the recommended client is the Ajax web client. ZCS supports Microsoft Outlook, Apple iSync, Ximian Evolution, and other clients as well.

Mailbox Management—ZCS offers advanced search capabilities, filters, Tags, grouping emails by conversation, and custom handling of messages through message rules.

Calendaring—the ability to share and sync calendars is crucial to any collaboration suite. Users may have multiple calendars and assign delegation and sharing of those calendars to additional users.

Access Email Anywhere—any user can access the Zimbra client from any computer with a connection to the internet, assuming they have a supported web browser installed and the email is made accessible via a publicly routable IP.

For the systems administrator, Zimbra provides:

Admin Console—easy configuration and user management via a web-based admin-console.

Monitoring Tools—in the form of performance dashboards for displaying and reviewing real-time system activity.

Storage Reduction—By storing only one copy of each email and email attachment, the amount of storage space necessary for emails sent to multiple recipients on the same server, substantially decreases. Utilizing multi-level caching and other optimization tools, ZCS is able to handle more users per CPU.

Built-in Security Tools—ZCS comes bundled with ClamAV and SpamAssassin for an integrated anti-virus and anti-spam solution, without the need of additional third party tools. Messages are handled using TLS/SSL ensuring encryption without the need for a VPN connection.

Multiple Domain Support—ZCS offers administrators the ability to support multiple domains, each with its own unique configuration, from a single administration console.

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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Introducing Zimbra

Summary

This chapter served as a brief introduction to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. As an open source project, Zimbra has grown to a robust, scalable, and secure enterprise-level messaging platform that provides small, mid sized businesses a true collaboration suite, at a lower cost, as well as larger organizations a true alternative to Microsoft Exchange and other commercial collaboration suites.

ZCS offers many benefits to both the end-user and system administrator, including a powerful web-client providing users with many tools to help facilitate collaboration and teamwork through the ability to share documents, calendars, and address books.

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