McNitt — Web strategy, social networking, standards-based development, accessibility, dancing, running, buddhism, other bits of fun

It’s here, and it’s here in a big way – finally a Linux-based open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange good enough to call a killer application. Sporting an ultra slick AJAX web-based front end, Zimbra combines email, calendar, and directory server applications. Zimbra is fully compatible with existing desktop programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail and iCal and can be extended with user developed plug-ins to create custom links to applications like Skype, Google Maps, and more.

For the developers in the crowd, Zimbra also comes with a full open source AJAX GUI framework (AjaxTK) which can be used to build your own AJAX powered web applications completely independent of Zimbra. The Zimbra home page states, “At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, and scale the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.”

Kudos to Zimbra and thank you to Kevin Yank at SitePoint for bringing this story to light in the latest issue of the SitePoint tech times. Zimbra is a huge win for the open source community. You can follow a developer community discussions at the Zimbra forum and download beta code today.