Sunday, June 22, 2008
Zimbra: Mobile Me for business users
Recently, Apple announced MobileMe. To call it just a re-branding of their existing .Mac would be a disservice. It really packs much more value into the package many of us have come to know and love. But their “exchange for the rest of us” tag line, while catchy, is not really appropriate. Apples’ service is designed for the individual. It is called Mobile “ME” for a reason - it allows you to do limited sharing with your friends and family - but it doesn’t really help when you need to collaborate with others.
More importantly, it only supports their iPhone, so mobile clients other than the iPhone are out of luck. I love the iPhone - and I can’t wait to get their 3G version, and this might not really be a decision for a family either - just be sure that all your family members have iPhones too. But it doesn’t cut it as a business platform where you have to accept diversity in clients.
“Exchange for the rest of us” is more apt in reference to Zimbra.
Zimbra lets you share files with your colleagues - but it offers you the ability to password protect the access, or to make your files public.
They support a wide variety of mobile clients, including the iPhone.
They allow you book appointments and check other folks schedules before putting out a meeting invitation.
And it works seamlessly with Outlook, provides native OS-X sync services support and even supports Linux clients. Not to mention the award winning AJAX browser interface both online and off-line. True freedom of choice.
At a similar price point per user per month.
Need to collaborate with others? Try Zimbra.
