Zimbra and Apple

Damnit... I really wish Apple had bought Zimbra. I mean, I respect Yahoo n' all (they're pretty adherent to standards, they're Mac-friendly, AJAX pioneers, etc.), but if Apple would have purchased Zimbra, I believe it could have turned the collaboration industry on its head.

First, Apple would have a truly small biz-to-enterprise-ready collaboration suite. It competes with Exchange in handling email (actually bests it, I think), has great spam filtering built-in, has kickass calendaring and resource management (well, the resource management could use a bit of cleaning up), and the forthcoming 5.0 has task management and the "briefcase" function that is really going to make Zimbra irresistible to many (I'll be taking a weekend and upgrading us immediately after its release).

I think Zimbra is such a good fit for Apple due to the fact that it's so open: it uses MySQL for data storage, ClamAV for anti-virus, SpamAssassin for spam filtering, tomcat (now jetty) for the mail engine, postfix for mail delivery, OpenLDAP for directory, and a number of other open source packages for its internals. It supports IMAP, POP, MS-MAPI (in the paid version), iCal (you can publish/subscribe to/from any iCalendar-supporting app, such as iCal, Outlook 2007, Evolution, Sunbird, google calendar, etc.), WebDAV (in 5.0), and CalDAV support is planned soon after, which means that it will work read/write with Apple iCal, Evolution, Sunbird, and (supposedly eventually) Outlook. Zimbra can, and does, operate as a complete replacement for Exchange... something that Apple could do really well to provide, as it would turn their pokes into the enterprise market into deep, gouging jabs. Some more facts:

• Zimbra 5.0's mobile interface was made for the iPhone. It's gorgeous.
• It could easily be integrated into Open Directory even further, as it already uses OpenLDAP for its directory.
• It already works with Address Book, iCal, Apple Mail, Finder (WebDAV), Safari. And swimmingly, at that.
• It would force Apple to hone their clustering offerings, as Mac OS X is the only platform that isn't currently supported in those configurations.
• It would be even one more reason for Linux fanbois and developers to love Apple. ;)

But alas... it is too late. Yahoo owns Zimbra now. And if Microsoft buys Yahoo, which I don't believe will happen, I'll be one horribly disappointed Zimbra fan.

(UPDATE) Ooooh ooh, I just thought of something regarding OpenLDAP integration: in a managed client scenario, OpenDirectory would provide a users' Zimbra mail server configuration, which would be provided to all necessary Apple (and perceivably third-party) applications via LDAP, so when he/she fires up Apple Mail, no configuration would be necessary, as it's all provided via their OpenDir profile. Tasty!