Oracle Calendar Replacement - Zimbra Pilot
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This pilot evaluation has ended. These pages are no longer relevant for the proposed service. A production service is being deployed as University Collaboration Suite (UCS) beginning Summer 2011. Please see your ITS Consultant for more information. |
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Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is being evaluated as a replacement for the end-of-life Oracle Calendar service. Zimbra (ZCS) is a collection of Collaborative Software Services with a specific focus on interoperability with Microsoft Exchange.
Detail
A number of Departments, Colleges, and Organizations within the University have expressed serious interest in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), and its potential in both their own and the University environment. Much of this interest has been attributed to the lack of support for OS X and Linux platforms by the eCollaboration software offerings previously evaluated by ITS. To address this need for platform and client flexibility, we are evaluating ZCS's capabilities in the eCollaboration space, with a significant focus on its compatibility with Microsoft Outlook and interoperability with Exchange for calendaring operations.
Evaluation Phases
- Phase One - Viability Assessment
- Viability assessment was conducted internally working with use cases from similar eCollaboration software evaluations.
- Our first phase in the evaluation focused on pure functionality testing, and verification of product claims, including some overall usability assessment. Significant time and energy was spent examining ZCS's ability to integrate with our existing authentication (Kerberos/WebAccess), and authorization (LDAP) infrastructure. Further tests examining central storage integration, and cluster designs are ongoing. The goal of this phase is to assess the overall viability of ZCS in the existing Penn State IT infrastructure.
- The first of these two phases is complete with tests and results to be published shortly.
- Phase Two - Feature Testing
- Feature testing will commence specifically with a targeted pilot of the new system once it has been hardened and passed performance measures. Our target is to begin a pilot program for Phase Two this summer 2010 in the form of a community evaluation and assessment.
- Our second phase of testing has so far centered around feature and manageability elements. The full spectrum of product features are being examined on the most popular browser options and native clients across multiple different operating systems. Certain features, such as clustering and high availability, are involved with our pilot deployment, and as such are being subject to special focus and intense scrutiny. In addition, the pilot will be used to accumulate the data necessary to craft realistic estimates of implementation and maintenance costs for how this environment would be appropriately scaled.
Pilot Participation
Given the broad spectrum of environments and individuals within the University, ITS is aware of the difficulty identifying every possible use case. Despite our best efforts, there will undoubtedly be features and or scenarios we have been unable to test. Our answer to this will be to engage those parties within the Penn State IT community who might be interested in using Zimbra as a replacement for the Oracle Calendar service.
In the near term, ITS will be providing a limited pilot of ZCS to stakeholders, decision makers, and interested parties within the University. Exact details on the date of this roll-out, its precise nature, and availability will be forthcoming. If you are interested in being involved in the pilot, or simply wish to keep abreast of its development, please send a message to gnr-pilot@psu.edu.
This page will continue to be updated with further information, including links to relevant data, as the project continues.
