I finally understand the major reason MS is so hard to displace.   And it has to do with typically American, idiotic busines-by-the-spread-sheet.

We're getting our major business system replaced ... by a .NET system.  I recommended otherwise, the entire tech staff recommended otherwise.  Two sets of high priced consultants recommended otherwise.  But the venture capitalists at the top of the food chain said "dot net".

Discussed it with our divisional CEO, and he finally got it through to me.   Those venture capitalists make no bones about their intention to buy several companies in the same industry, meld them together and sell off the result.  It seems that an MS solution is valued *because* it is so expensive (and otherwise an accepted business practice).  So when the time comes to sell off, the capitalized value of the infrastructure will mean a lot in a service industry with little else in the way of capital assets.

Insane? Yep, but I don't make the rules.  I know just enough about accounting to see how this can work in practice.  Our CEO and his bosses understand that a LAMP (or java) solution would be technically superior, and more stable ... but it wouldn't be as "valuable" (literally) on the books.

sPh

I went over to their site and they have expanded the offerings, including a SuSE build.  I went ahead and downloaded it.  However, after reading through the first part of the install instructions. it indicates you cannot have any other copies of the supporting programs running on the Zimbra "box" - MySQL, Apache, etc.

That pretty much precludes me from testing it on my server as I have all those running already for different purposes.  That seems like a pretty bad limitation on the part of the Zimbra folks - you either have to have a dedicated server or I suppose a dedicated vm.

I do have a spare box sitting in a corner.  Wonder if I could get it up and running and attached to the network for some testing?  Maybe I'll give it a try.