Nowadays, email is one of any company’s mission-critical applications. Zarafa combines the usability of Outlook with the stability and flexibility of a Linux server. Not only is Outlook supported natively, but users can also use WebAccess, which has the same look and feel as Web 2.0 Outlook, all ActiveSync-compatible mobile devices and BlackBerry handhelds via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Main features:

E-mail
Not only can you access your private email, but Zarafa also allows you to share your mailbox with colleagues via an advanced permissions system.

Group mailboxes and public folders can be used for all incoming information, support or sales emails and with the server-side rules wizard you can organize your email automatically.

Calendar
Share calendars, plan meetings with your colleagues with free/busy information, send meeting requests or book resources. You can use any of these features via the Outlook client or Zarafa WebAccess.

The CalDAV gateway even synchronizes your calendar with other clients.

Contacts
All internal Zarafa users and groups are available in a global address book. Of course you can manage personal contacts and distribution lists, but centrally maintained contact folders are also available.

Tasks
You can keep personal task lists or share them with colleagues to work much more effectively.

Technical features:
Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) is open-source, and licensed under the official software licence Affero GPLv3.  Zarafa uses standard Linux packages such as the Apache web server, Postfix email server and MySQL database. These are interchangeable with other packages which can perform the same tasks, making Zarafa highly flexible.  ZCP offers some quite substantial technical advantages related to its openness and compatibility. For this reason, Fedora and many other distributions have adopted Zarafa in their packages as the default enterprise-ready open-source groupware.

Open architecture

• Zarafa is licensed according to a GPL-compliant licence. This is an official approved licence by the Free Software Foundation. This is regarded by many communities that have adopted ZCP as making the product’s future more secure.
• Due to its open LAMP architecture, Zarafa benefits from scalability. Zarafa has integrated best-in-breed open-source components such as MTAs (such as Postfix), SQL databases and Apache web servers. These leading open-source products  also form the foundations of the world’s leading web platforms. ZCP benefits from Zarafa’s R&D interaction with leading engineers from platforms such as Facebook.    Reuse of existing system components is a much more sensible, efficient, effective and sustainable  approach to groupware suite architecture. It allows for both increased option value in terms of choice  and integration (and hence interoperability), and military-grade security through Security Enhanced Linux.
• You can integrate ZCP with your existing Linux mail server infrastructure, which means that Zarafa doesn’t provide its own configured SMTP server, web server or database server. In this respect, ZCP differs from other solutions with their own specially developed, compiled and configured components. Their MTA, database and SSL suffer from higher security and TCO costs, as they cannot benefit from the supported OS.
• With Z-merge, Zarafa has a unique replication framework which makes continuous replication of data between Zarafa and other applications possible.

Unique compatibility

• Due to its MAPI compatibility, Zarafa is the only scalable MS Exchange replacement available. Zarafa is the only solution that has implemented the MAPI standard from beginning to end.
• Zarafa is the only groupware that offers full open-source ActiveSync compatibility. Even competitors have joined Zarafa’s Z-push platform – the standard in open source ActiveSync.

Scope
Zarafa differs from proprietary and other open-source vendors in being the only vendor combining open, compatible and enterprise collaboration. Thanks to this combination, Zarafa is regarded by its customers and partners as the only real replacement for Microsoft Exchange.