Zarafa offers a flexible email and collaboration platform that integrates with existing infrastructures, providing businesses with an efficient way to enhance communication and productivity.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Zarafa | 1.6% |
| Google Workspace | 14.3% |
| Microsoft Exchange Online | 9.0% |
| Other | 75.1% |
Built on open-source foundations, Zarafa delivers a robust yet adaptable framework for email exchange, calendaring, and task management. Its design supports seamless interoperability with Microsoft Outlook, enhancing user experience by aligning with familiar tools. With its web-based access and high scalability, Zarafa is ideal for organizations seeking a secure and cost-effective communication upgrade.
What are the most important features of Zarafa?Zarafa is widely adopted in industries like healthcare and education, where reliable communication and secure data handling are priority. Its integration capabilities ensure it fits into existing systems smoothly, providing enhanced collaboration and resource management. This adaptability makes it a superb choice for companies looking to modernize their communications infrastructure.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I found Zarafa a lightweight, free Exchange alternative with great Outlook integration and ActiveSync, easy for Linux admins. While it needs MySQL tuning and Zarafa-index can be resource-heavy, I used it over two years successfully for clients. |
| Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | No summary available |
Zarafa has several very valuable features, among them a very good Outlook-like web interface.
Furthermore, ZPush for talking between ActiveSync and mobile devices is a valuable asset.
In addition, one is able to connect via Outlook and the exchange protocol to Zarafa. This makes Zarafa a free, and working, alternative to Microsoft Exchange.
I mostly installed Zarafa for customers. They found it to be a lightwight groupware solution with many enterprise features, such as connecting to Active Directory or OpenLDAP.
As far as I know, only MySQL is supported. It would be great to also have Postgres support, but I am not sure if this is possible in a technical way because Zarafa has very specific requirements when it comes to storing MAPI objects in a database.
I was using it for more than two years.
You should be aware that Zarafa will create a lot of database entries, so you should tune MySQL (especially the InnoDB options).
Not really, although the Zarafa-index component was using a lot of memory and disk I/O bandwith.
I used Kolab, but connecting via Outlook was only possible with IMAP or a MAPI connector (and all of them were not working very well). Zarafa, instead, supports MAPI in a natural way.
Initial setup is very easy if you are an experienced Linux user/admin.
Pros
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+ Drop in replacement for exchange
+ Open-source runs on linux
+ Lower hardware requirements
+ Outlook support
+ A fraction of the license costs
+ blackberry and active sync support
+ exchange migration tools
+ Online documentation
Cons
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+ webapp is replacing webaccess but is still missing some features.
Experiences
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As a zarafa partner we can count on great support from Zarafa. Depolyment is easy, dependencies are automatic taken care of and the online documentation is great
Business Metrics
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Zarafa is a fraction of the cost what u would pay for exchange also hardware requirements are much lower. One of our clients is running quite easy 350 users on a single machine.
Alternatives Vendors
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Zimbra is the other alternative with commercial support. Reason we prefer Zarafa is that it wil not touch the postfix or other components so security wise a better choice.
