Zimbra hooks up with Exchange

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 01 October 2008 12:16

Business IT - Open Source

Interoperability between Zimbra Collaboration Suite and Microsoft Exchange 2003 is the promise of a new extension developed by Yahoo! subsidiary Zimbra.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is offered in two versions. One is open source, the other is commercially supported. The new extension can be used with either at no charge.

"Interoperability with Exchange and other leading collaboration systems is a top request by many enterprises and academic institutions where mixed deployments are common," said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president.

"Zimbra's recent growth with large organizations has been tremendous, with recent customer wins and deal expansions including Dai Nippon Publishing, Reliance Industries, H&R Block and Texas A&M University. This interoperability builds upon a long record of compatibility work by Zimbra and is one of the key needs for our largest customers."

The framework provides interoperability of schedules and free/busy information, and integration with Active Directory to provide a single address list for ZCS and Exchange users.

No changes to the Exchange server are required, according to Zimbra officials.

The framework used to create the extension is publicly available, and Zimbra hopes other developers will use it to create extensions to deliver interoperability with other collaboration systems such as Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise.