SF Tech Sessions Post Mortem
Last night's SF Tech Session was a great experience. Thanks much to Niall for organizing, C|Net for providing the space, and to all who came. The experience was certainly educational. Here are my rough thoughts about each of the presentations.
Kerio went first, and they're very much built into their own status quo. Things work the way they do because that's how they work in Outlook/Exchange. Which isn't something anyone really wants, but it's what some people say they want. I'm sure it's robust, I'm sure it's very feature heavy, but if it doesn't deal well with Mail.app or iCal or AddressBook (at all), then I'm not sure it's something I can recommend to my Mac clients.
Their presentation left me absolutely cold, where once I was a bit warm. That's never good, folks.
Zimbra was the winner of the evening. Their webmail client, as well as their innate compatibility with Apple's built in connectivity apps, are the most solid of the bunch. If your company is used to the Mail paradigm, then Zimbra is for you. Between extensible architectures for their handy Zimlets (and the ability to build your own), and good offline options with many mail clients, and decent support for various mobile devices show the system off well.
If you're using a Mail server now, and want to continue to do Mail + Calendar + Other, then Zimbra's what you want to use. They have an open source version, complete with a .dmg installer for OS X users, that's freely available today, so that much is pretty damn cool.
Joyent were the other winners for the night, but their market is very different. They're targetting a wholly different crowd of people, which made the whole thing much cooler. Their target market is a group with less than 25, maybe even less than 10 users who are going to share everything. This isn't just email, it's full on social collaboration. Their licensing is fairly straight forward, you can host it with them, with up to 25 users and 100GB of space costing $100/mo or 10 users costing $50 or so a month. There are also “lifetime” options that will be good for as long as they're in business, which, given their track record of being in the black the whole life of their company, is going to be a while.
Both Zimbra and Joyent make serious use of iCal and RSS feed information, and pretty much anything is trackable.
I declare Zimbra and Joyent winners, Zimbra for large enterprise, Joyent for small business, and Kerio the outright loser. It was like bringing a Pinto to an Indy Car Race.
Thanks again to Niall and to C|Net for hosting, I hope this starts a rich tradition of open dialogue between companies and their users in this format. It was also very nice to get to hang out with and meet the staffs of all three groups, as it made a difference. I've always been a big fan of doing business not with companies, but with the people who run them. It makes the relationship more real, and I'd rather have a face and a name than just a representative. Having dinner last night with the gang from Joyent, including John Gruber, as well as Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg, Scott Beale and many others.
This trip was absolutely a success, and worth the entire experience, if not just for the Ballpark Tour I took today over at AT&T Park, er, SBC Park, er, Pac Bell Park, er, that place where the Giants play.
Technorati Tags: Joyent, Kerio, SF Tech Sessions, Zimbra
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