Zimbra Desktop: Outlook killer or bloatware?

Viewing emails in Zimbra Desktop

Zimbra Desktop is Zimbra’s answer to Microsoft’s Outlook. Contrary to what one would expect, Zimbra Desktop does not require a Zimbra server. It is simply a stand-alone desktop email client that works on all major platforms (Linux/Mac/Windows).

Zimbra Desktop comes with all the bells and whistles one would expect from an modern Personal Information Manager (PIM), such as POP3/IMAP support, contacts and calendar. In addition to these features, Zimbra Desktop also supports contacts and calendar synchronization with both Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As far as features goes, it comes close to Outlook. At a low price of $0, could it be a potential Outlook killer?

If you take a look at the interface of Zimbra Desktop, you’ll find that it strongly resembles the web interface of Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). There is a good reason for this. To put it in a simple terms, Zimbra took the interface from ZCS, made it run locally with the Mozilla engine and packaged it as an application. Since ZCS relies heavily on Java, porting it to several platforms was an easy task.

After using Zimbra Desktop for a few hours, I noticed a few things:

• The synchronization with my Google calendar and contacts only partially worked (I got about 5% of my contacts across).
• You cannot open emails in a new window or tab. List-view is the only option.
• There is no time-zone function in the calendar (a feature I use a lot).

No time-zones?

So what is holding Zimbra Desktop back? It’s all in the interface. While Zimbra’s idea of porting the interface from ZCS to the desktop sounds like a great idea on paper, in reality it fails. If you’ve ever looked at the utilization of a Zimbra server, you know that it drains a ton of resources. This is likely to be because a lot of the components are written in Java, which is not really the most lightweight programming language. For the exact same reason, Zimbra Desktop runs slowly and consumes a lot of resource. Finally, since it is not written as a native application, it does not share the look and feel of the rest of the system.

While it might be great to be able to access your emails offline, I would much rather use ZCS in my web-browser. By doing so, I can put all of that load on the server instead of my local machine. Granted, Microsoft Exchange (or Entourage on Mac) is not really a lightweight product either, but it does at least integrate natively with the system. That said, Zimbra Desktop is still a valuable addition to ZCS if considered as an offline extension to ZCS rather than as a stand-alone email client. In many ways, Zimbra Desktop is more similar to Gmail with Google Gears (but much more bloated) than Outlook.