Comments on: The Zimbra opportunity: A true social network

Email offers real data on my social graph. Why not pull from Zimbra to create a true social network?

[rfuller2007]

social network before its time

david gilmour over at tacit built a system that automatically mines email and proactively suggests connections between people emailing about similar subject matter. it's an enterprise play and companies with far flung researchers are using it. it's not new, or open source, but gets more and more relevant all the time.

[dogStar1000]

Enterprise-class?

Does "Enterprise-class" mean - written in Java to be as complicated as possible thereby increasing its value perception by brain-dead managers?

In all seriousness, my experience of Zimbra is that it comes as a single bundle of modified versions of Postfix and OpenLDAP with its own hand-rolled IMAP server.

Monolithic bundles of vendor-modified software are distinctly sub-optimal if your looking for a modular and highly scalable architecture using standard or transparently modified Open Source packages.

Given Matt's association with Alfresco, perhaps I'm posting on the wrong blog?

[Matt Asay]

lol, no I'm not tainted by my Java affiliation

But you can do "modular" and Java in the same application. I think Alfresco does this increasingly well with its "AMP" extensions. Zimbra is doing it through Zimlets. I'm not a developer so I'm not qualified to judge whether these *actually* work for developers, but I've heard quite a bit of commentary that they do, in fact, do this.