Having built my own web-based email client and experiencing how much effort goes into parsing the email message itself, and then moving on to building my own web-based Calendar, I appreciate when a company goes to all that trouble and releases a free version of a very good collaboration tool such as Zimbra.
Here is my experience with deploying Zimbra Collaboration Suite on Fedora Core 6 (minimal installation specifically designed to server as an "applicance" server and nothing more).
I downloaded zcs open edition and proceeded to jump right in. After un-taring the tarball I went straight into the directory and looked at what was in there. I checked out the README and saw that you need to run ./install.sh, so I did.
After agreeing to the License agreement (who reads these things anyhow?), it checked for the pre-req's, two of which I didn't meet.
I needed to install GPM and libstdc++. A simple yum install gpm was sufficient to have this installed. But I have to go to RPMFind and look for libstdc++ and find the compat-libstdc++ RPM manually.
After installing these two packages, all the requirements were met. It checked for any of the Zimbra packages that might be installed (none were found obviously) and moved on to asking whether or not it could install these packages.
After installing the packages, it went directly to the System Config script (/opt/zimbra/libexec/zmsetup.pl). After going through the "your server is not set up in the DNS correctly" and bypassing certain config issues simply because I had to, I got to the installation of LDAP.
The error that came back said something about su (or sudo) failing because I needed a TTY. A quick bit of research found that in the /etc/sudoers file (visudo) the DEFAULTS requiretty was enabled, literally killing the install scripts ability to execute what it needed to.
After commenting this out, re-running the zmsetup.pl script, LDAP installed correctly.
Other than this, there were no other issues with the install script.
Everything got to the end and the "Setup Completed - Press any Key" prompt graced my presence and I was happy.
I su - zimbra and issued the zmcontrol status command and found that tomcat wasn't running.
I checked the /var/log/zimbra.log and a few other log files and it turned out that something was not able to access the MySQL server that zimbra installed.
After at least three days of searching, a very simple solution presented itself to me.
The order of my /etc/hosts file was incorrect, which caused MySQL to use the incorrect "domain" as part of it's authentication process for the zimbra system which caused tomcat to fail to start.
I put my 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost entry as the first line in my /etc/hosts file and issued a zmcontrol stop; zmcontrol start; zmcontrol status command to find that bingo, everything started up and was running perfectly.
I've since created an account, auto-forwarded my email from my original mail server to the appliance server and so far so good. I'm in the process of training the SPAM and HAM filters (love the concept of HAM btw) and am about to convert my entire company to Zimbra.
As for the user interface on both the web client and admin console, I have worked with DHTML/AJAX applications for years and the easy of use combined with the beautiful/sexy interfaces is a triumph for Zimbra. They have done extremely well! Congratuations Zimbra Inc.
As far as the Network Edition (NE), if I felt that the Open Source (OS) version was incapable of performing the tasks that the NE version does then I'm more than happy to have my company pay for the licenses, but until then, the OS version is spot on perfect.
I'm in the middle of reading about how I can make a contribution to the ZCS but I'm afraid that my area's of expertise might not be where they would need it the most, but I am still going to try to contribute.
I very much do recommend Zimbra as a solution to your corporate email issues.
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