Stanford goes with Zimbra over Microsoft and Google

Is Zimbra enterprise-ready? Yes, it is.

At least, that's the news from Stanford, which today announced that it is replacing its campus-wide email system with Zimbra. TechCrunch outs the competition on the deal, too: Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.

This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in ".edu."

I use Zimbra on a daily basis and absolutely love it. I love it for some of the same reasons that Stanford chose Zimbra:

Zimbra was selected because the technology allows access to e-mail, calendar and contact lists from a single, unified web interface--enabling easy sharing of information among the various services, according to Ammy Hill, campus readiness specialist for IT Services. She added that Zimbra is an open-source, standards-based solution that works equally well on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

It's that last bit that I particularly love. With Zimbra, no operating system is a second-class citizen. With more and more people switching to the Mac, this is particularly important. Who wants a Microsoft-centered existence that neglects those that haven't capitulated to Windows?

[tymiles]

All sounds well till MS buys a chunk or all of Yahoo and Zimbra goes the way of the dinosaur.

I like Zimbra a lot but I would be worried about a product that may not make it out of the 4th quarter of this year.