The Blog from Mercian Labels & Security Labels International

Before we migrate any more users across to Zimbra we are waiting on the new version, that should support tasks (which is important). Apparently its due out Monday in RC1, so we have booked some support with Senokian to get the upgrade installed.

Of course there is the recent news that Zimbra has been bought out by Yahoo! for $350m… I hope this is good news, as I’m not aware of yahoo being a major supporter of open source. Hopefuly the development will be pushed along a little quicker after the dust has settled, as I for one would like to see the introduction of read receipts in Zimbra which still isnt there!

There has been a log of blog comment on the sale – if you are interested I find the Open Road a good blog.

http://blogs.cnet.com/8300-13505_1-16.html?tag=bc

Part of my role as MD of Mercian Labels is keeping upto date with lots of different sources of information. The web is by far the most efficent way fo doing this, but it can be all consuming…. drowning in data.

Enter the benefits of an open source plugin for Firefox, update scanner. Its a fantastic tool to save you the trouble to checking all of the websites you try to keep in touch with, and clearly alerts you when they change. I use it for monitoring trade information websites, competitors, suppliers, forums, google webmaster tools etc.Now this type of tool isn’t, to my knowledge, available to integrate with closed source browsers such as IE.

Its simple, this is an excellent open source tool that saves me time. All credit to the author for the idea, and thank you Pete Burgess.

I’ve only used my laptop with ubuntu/firefox/zimbra for just over a week now (retaining my now redundant xp/outlook dual boot system in case of crisis…). Its been great, only a few problems, and the following notes may be of interest to some:

• nothing has crashed. period. I’ve had to do a single SO kill once when I lost my internet conenction whilst running remote desktop in full screen mode which I didnst know how to close, but thats it. Before this, I used to regularly kill XP and or outlook to carry on working. This is an improvement in reliability.
• Its great having your email server side, with no need to HAVE to have your laptop to do email, calendar and contact work. Ok, you can do this with many different systems (outlook does this, although I always ran client side), but Zimbra does this well.
• Zimbra is very reliable and syncs very well with my nokia E90, enabling full functionality on the move. But, it does have its drawbacks. There is no read receipt function, there is no task managment (yet, due out shortly) and setting up disclaimers is a sys admin job and really should be in the management console.
• I lost some email uptime (but no emails) this week due to a slight configuration update, but this was no problem and fixed very quickly and competantly by Senokian.
• Quanta Plus website design program doesnt even open for me. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and no joy. So, I’m resorting to website updates by remote desktop onto our work server.
• Toodledo works fine as a substitute for tasks in zimbra, but I’d rather have it all on one package.
• The nokia e90 has a microphone defect that gives noise occasionally for no reason, so it will have to go back if it gets worse for a replacement.
• I still cannt get WPA wifi encryption to logon. This is a serious problem that I wil need to refer to Senokian when I next meet them face to face to be solved, as it will be painful not to have this functionality permanently.
• As I’m still running dual boot, most of my fire archive is still on the NTS partition. I have yet to move all the files over and repartition the drive.
• The suspend/hiberate function dosnt work on my HP nx6125 laptop, am still looking for a solution.

Overall, I’m very happy, and proud of the switch. I’m free.

As a business we still have a long way to go, with lots more php programming of our CRM system by Rich and configuration of our astrix phone system, but we are well on the way.

I will be migrating more users to zimbra once v5 is out in 3 weeks time and shutting down our outlook useage.

This weeks job is the phone system. Watch this space…