Zimbra offers elegant mobility links

We believe that compatibility with Microsoft Outlook is critical for any product in this marketplace. We also believe that most businesses will want a mobility solution, especially one based on Microsoft ActiveSync, for "push" e-mail, as well as synchronized contacts and calendaring.

Microsoft's own Exchange server matches up to Outlook, and works well with ActiveSync clients. One area where Microsoft has done a poor job, though, is in Macintosh support, so we were also interested to see how well our test systems would work with Macintosh systems.

Our testing with IMAP and POP protocols was flawless on all the products, much as we expected.

With Outlook, we didn't achieve 100% success. Of course, you can always connect Outlook using IMAP and POP, but this doesn't bring the same set of collaboration tools, such as shared and synchronized contact lists, shared calendars and free/busy scheduling. To connect Outlook successfully to one of these servers requires an adapter, something that speaks MAPI (Microsoft's e-mail API protocol) to Outlook and some other protocol to the e-mail server.

Five of the products included a MAPI connector; only MailSite Fusion has no way to cleanly link Outlook to its e-mail server. We found that the MAPI connectors all had slight idiosyncrasies. For example, we looked at calendar sharing, a common but fairly advanced feature. In the Zimbra Collaboration Suite MAPI connector, sharing your calendar will generate a message to the person you're sharing it with to accept the connection. If they decide to accept it, then their MAPI connector is automatically reconfigured to include the other calendar. In Kerio's MAPI connector, the reconfiguration on the other end has to be done manually. Each of the products had small differences, some of which were annoying but none of which significantly affected functionality.

In general, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite had the most elegant integration with MAPI, but this was by a slim margin — unless the things it does better such as managing calendars are critical features for you.

Our conclusion is that taken as a big picture, MAPI-based Outlook connection works great for each product, but depending on exactly which of the dozens of features you want to use, such as contact and calendar sharing, multiple global address lists, collaborative scheduling, public folders or offline operation, you may find glitches that affect your final deployment. In any case, we didn't find any product that outdid Outlook in its compatibility and smooth integration. The mail server vendors all worked hard to make Outlook connect to their products, but if you're expecting a seamless linkup, you'll be at least slightly disappointed.

Because all of these vendors offer easy-to-install demonstration versions, testing is easy — but these details aren't ones you can get out of a public test. You will also find that MAPI development is an area of aggressive change for each of these vendors. In reading release notes for each of the products, many were making substantial changes to their MAPI connectors in recent versions, especially as they tested for Exchange 2007 features.

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