First of all, let me say I’m a big Zimbra fan. Open-Xchange is shaping up to be a nice collaboration suite, but still not up to par with Zimbra. But then there is the Zimbra desktop… In my opinion, resources that should have been spent on other things.

In short, Zimbra desktop is a Jetty server running the ZCS on your desktop machine, which regularly syncing with your main server. Which means you’re running a bloaty Java beast on your PC, sucking up all those nice RAM and cpu cycles. And in the end, you are still using the webclient..

In the meantime, Thunderbird, Zindus and Sunbird are a match made in heaven for Zimbra users, providing free and open source calendaring, mail, tasks and contacts on every Thunderbird-supported platform. Putting half the manpower on that threesome and helping with bug fixing and implementing new features there would do a lot more good then trying to throw together a half-baked Java daemon and announcing it like it’s the holy grail of collaborative messaging.

For the record, Sunbird is about to release version 0.8 ;)