Outsourcing the Heartbeat

Since I’m at factline I started more than a couple of different jobs. Today I’ll talk a little about some internal (infra)structural actions we already took and that we are going to take. For the time being factline had it’s own [tag-tec]email[/tag-tec] server at its premises with big harddrives, latest open source software in place (linux, cyrus, postfix, spam-assassin, etc.) and a very capable system-admin who took care of all that. Well, we decided to start changing that on the basis of bundling our forces to focus on our core business. Providing email for our employees that are spread between Vienna and Sofia – considered as a fundamental tool for internal/external communications – is of course of utmost relevance.Precisely due to that we decided to move to an external service provider.

As you all know there are some choices out there. In the finals were only two options: Google (aka Gmail) and [tag-tec]Zimbra[/tag-tec]. Although big admirers of Google’s apps we voted for Zimbra.

And here are the reasons: Although Gmail has the best interface available and a stunning functionality and performance the disadvantages (and some of the benefits of Zimbra in spite of its ugly interface) are:

- Googles servers are provided under US law
- my partners need to have the vision that a server needs to be physically available (in reach via public transport .
- it is impossible to mimick traditional inbox -behavior in [tag-ice]Gmail[/tag-ice] (you can do that with [tag-ice]Zimbra[/tag-ice])
- Google doesn’t allow it (at least not cheaply) to upload you GBs of received and sent email from the last 10 years
- Google doesn’t provide that easy integration with existing email and mobile clients (mainly due to lack of IMAP)
- by using a local Zimbra provider there is less (!) westward cash drain

To sum in up: we are in the midst of getting used to the new environment (some issues already – [tag-ice]RSS[/tag-ice] integration in Zimbra is rather bad). But altogether I think it makes perfectly sense to go the SaaS (=Software as a Service) – way.

Next on my roadmap is getting rid of the local file-server you can imagine what that entails.

[tags]firm[/tags] [tags]outsourcing[/tags]