Email 2.0 with Zimbra

For most people in business, email is probably the most useful web related application; it???s replaced snail mail and fax to a significant extent, it provides a quick way to communicate with multiple people, and to send response quickly. Where typically you would spend days waiting for a reply through the postal system, you can expect to get a response within hours to an email; to the point where people now routinely expect same day replies and aren???t willing to wait longer.
Broadly, you???ll find 3 different categories of email options ??? web services like Hotmail / Yahoo / Gmail, your own domain based email when you get your website hosted and corporate networks. Although these work together, the beast below the hood is quite different.

Most of the free web services have extensively customized applications, in some cases using different protocols, like Hotmail with the httpmail approach. Domain based email is likely to be some variant of Sendmail / Postfix, given that Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP is the dominant server platform for web servers. While large corporate email networks are likely to be MS Exchange based.

Exchange does offer additional functionality including calendar and meeting management; but the downside is that web access can be quite rudimentary. If you???re significantly on the road, have to access your mail through a VPN, and are stuck in a dial-up access situation, say goodbye to your email for as long as you???re away. Plus, even if you do have a web access, functionality is a far cry from what you see with most web services.

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Enter Zimbra. An Open Source offering, Zimbra brings AJAX and web style functionality, mashups, mobile access, collaboration tools while still providing compatibility with Outlook and Exchange. Best of all, this is offered to businesses both as a self-hosted or as a service through hosting partners; this makes Exchange style collaboration accessible to smaller businesses at a much lower cost.

Check out the hosted demo ??? it???s awesome. I???d recommend using Firefox to check this out ??? IE doesn???t seem to be as responsive.