Web-based Microsoft Office alternatives?

December 30, 2009 8:38 AM

Does anyone use Zimbra as a complete replacement for Office/Exchange? How did it go? Are there any builds of Zimbra that attempt to declutter the interface? Alternatively, are there any open source projects that provide Google Docs functionality, that I don't know about?

I really like Google Docs but need to have it hosted on my own machines for reasons beyond my controls. I installed and played around with Zimbra, and it replaces Exchange well, but I found the document portion of it clunky, at least compared to Google's offerings and Etherpad (which I was looking into before Google bought it).

Anyone using Zimbra day-to-day? Do you see yourself reverting to using Office products? When I use Google Docs I never seem to reach for Office. Zimbra just seemed, a bit strange, and I couldn't tell if it was inexperience with the interface or if it just wasn't there yet. There's a Gmail theme for Zimbra but that just kind of changes the colors.

Any experiences or recommendations? Not set on Zimbra, and would be willing to separate mail, scheduling and documents to separate applications. It is really just the documents feature that I'm looking to replace, but it looks like everything is sort of lumped together now.

posted by geoff. to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Geoff, my employers very recently deployed Zimbra for about 30 users at a client site. I'm on holiday at the moment so can't make enquiries about how it's worked out, but there don't seem to have been any major glitches. If it's still relevant to you in a couple of weeks, memail me and I can find out what the big complaints were.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:41 AM on December 30, 2009

My employer recently switched from Eudora to Zimbra email, and this has not been a happy time.
posted by Danf at 11:05 AM on December 30, 2009

Response by poster: Danf can you be more specific?
posted by geoff. at 11:38 AM on December 30, 2009

My university rolled out Zimbra this year. After a few months, I ditched Mac Entourage for good at work and at home. Really solid - we were previously using the Web 1.0 SquirrelMail, and the Zimbra upgrade is just fantastic. However, Zimbra Documents do not seem full-fledged enough to replace MS Word, not by a long shot.
posted by porn in the woods at 12:23 PM on December 30, 2009

I also recently switched from SquirrelMail to Zimbra to great effect. No troubles at all so far, and it's customizable enough that I was able to get around some of the interface options that irritated me (mostly related to message threading). My only caution would be that it's pretty resource intensive and runs quite slowly on my (terrible) machine at work.
posted by GodricVT at 1:05 PM on December 30, 2009

Danf can you be more specific?

In terms of functionality compared to Eudora. It is really hard for me to find emails from the past, in Zimbra. Possibly because the emails live in the clouds, rather than in my computer, I do not feel like I have as much control of the whole thing.

Nobody in my org much likes it.
posted by Danf at 2:05 PM on December 30, 2009

My alma mater now uses Zimbra and I keep in touch with the people who run their IT. The general consensus is that it's crashy and a bit unreliable, but you must understand they used to run sendmail and UNIX / Solaris utilities. The idea of moving to Exchange horrifies them. Working in an Exchange crazy org, it's easy for me to see why IT hates Exchange and why management loves it. It's quite crashy, but has many big organization features like email delegation.

Within Ubuntu I think we use a lot of different applications. Mail is obviously handled by standard UNIX mailers, but only mailing lists are stored; personal @ubuntu.com mail is forwarded not stored. I use gmail personally. Public calendars are handled on The Fridge (a website of announcements). For documents we have several tools. Anything intended to be shipped to users via package sits in bzr on Launchpad. Source code, example documents, offline documentation, READMEs etc. Other documentation resides in the Ubuntu Wiki; sometimes in Wiki markup and sometimes in attachments. Still more documents reside in Gobby, a sort of online collaborative text editor. And for IM communication we mainly use IRC. We also have an RSS aggregator that people use to share their blogs with the project.
posted by pwnguin at 4:43 PM on December 30, 2009

Response by poster: This is disappointing but does confirm that my concerns were not without merit. On another note it appears that Etherpad is now open source, I downloaded and played around with it and did not see any reduced functionality from before the buy-out. In fact it appears they cleaned up some code and just released it as they had it. Looks to be interesting but not quite ready for prime time. Thanks all.
posted by geoff. at 1:06 PM on January 1, 2010