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I’m quite behind on my blog, and a lot has gone on in the past 2 weeks in respect of my personal migration from outlook to zimbra.

First, I need to be clear that I am totally dependant on my sync’d nokia 9500 running with outlook to manage my business, my life and the variety of commercial projects I am running at any one time. Like any business, I get through a lot of email traffic, and I only run electronic calendaring, and task manger for all my 150-200 tasks running at any one time.

Having decided last week to start my migration to Zimbra, Dave at Senokian came over to give us an introduction to zimbra, do some configuration and get me setup.

There are problems, and potential solutions if you are expecting identical functionality in zimbra to outlook

1. There is currently no support for tasks in the web based zimbra interface. WHY??? I was suprised and v dissapoiinted to find this out. Tasks supprot is due out in the next release in October 2007, its finished development, but not in there in the current release.
2. The outlook migration tool in Zimbra only support migrations from outlook 2003, not outlook 2000, 2002 or 2007. I bet their are good reasons, and I know from the formums that I’m not the only only to whinge about this, but its bloody stupid. Lots and lots of potential ZIMBRA clients arent running the 2003 version, and its creating an extra barrier to migration for the uncommitted
3. You can export contacts as a CSV using he built in tool and import them into zimbra, but its not perfect
4. Calendar, ARHHH! Outlook dosnt suport export to ical format, so you have to download a tool in visual basic to do the export, and then import it into zimbra using a curl proceduire. its beyond me, so Senokian’s sys admin is hopefuly going to guide me through it tomorrow.
5. Zimbra dosnt support spam whitelists by default, it has to be setup seperately. Again, this NEEDS a simple web interface. Again, senokian have been good at helping us to solve this, but for any organisation like us receiving 4000+ spam emails a day, a whitelist is essential. Another job yet to be done.
6. Zimbra is fully web based, so no connection = no email, web or tasks…. unless you use the new Zikbra desktop tool, currently in alpha release. Seems to work well on my laptop though, I’m hoping to give this a full workout in due course.
7. writing emails to lots of people looks very slow, as you cannt drag and drop/select lots of addresses quickly. more comment will follow as I get stuck in.
8. I cannt copy my emails across from outlook 2000 to zimbra yet. Apparently there is an IMAP solution, but we havent got it configured yet. again, watch this space.

BUT, Zimbra is web based, more secure, more accesible (from any web terminal) and sems to work well. only time will tell.

We’ve bought a 25 user zimbra pro/mobile license, the first open source license we have bought.

I’m hoping to get my account transfered / configured within a week, ready to migrate all my life to Zimbra.

glup.

Jake over at Senokian put me onto Toodledo, a free online tool that has a Firefox plugin

http://www.toodledo.com

Its not open source, but  its a useful interim tool for those (like me) that rely heavily on the GTD (getting things done) system of time management, but dont have outlook task manager (I am moving away fromall outlook v shortly) and know that Zimbra dosnt yet support tasks (why?????)

Off topic, its an excellent book and system by the way.

As the project leader and guinea pig for our migration, I’ve moved from IE to Firefox as my permanant web browser.  I’m still keeping an IE instalation for compatability checking of any of our new websites, but I do like firefox.  The plugins are great, I have ben using this SEO plugin for a while which is great if you do SEO stuff

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

All the ebanking stuff works fine, surfing, tools, everything.  This is not suprising to some, but there are many people out there that dont know about alternative browser choices.

I prefer firefox now, despite being an IE user for a decade.  Converted !

I’ve been running openoffice on my laptop now for seeveral weeks, and have to say its really good.

There are a few new things to learn, numbering formats in Writer are slightly different to Word, and some XLS charts dont import well into Chart in open office and need redesigning.

I dont agree with some that say openoffice is slow.  Its not, certainly on my laptop with normal business files.

Overall, I’m pleased with the move to openoffice.org software – no loss of functionality, and its even a little quicker too!

Roll on the next migration stage…

Last week my outlook PST file exceeded 2GB and died.  Using the MS recovery tools I managed to get a lot of it back, but certainly not all, and It look me the best part of 10 hours to start a new uncorrupted PST file, import and syncronise all my calendar, contacts and email.  This is a serious aste of my time, and this is not the first time this has happened either.

So, today I am going over to Senokian to get some training in Zimbra, and move my email, contacts and calendar to a Zimbra platform.  We’ve bought a Zimbra Mobile license, so I want to see how easy it syncs with my nokia communicator 9500.  If it dosnt, the new mokia E90 communicator is launched next month…

Great news for us, Dell have indeed decided to specify Ubuntu as their prefered linux distro.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6610901.stm

That makes buying new PCs, and especially laptops much easier!

We are not currently a Dell user, but will almost certainly become one after this announcment.

Good decision Dell!