It is disheartening to see Zimbra losing functionality. There are plenty of email servers and clients available, but the thing that attracted me to Zimbra in the first place was the rich functionality: email, calendar, tasks, contacts (usual fair) plus document management, instant messages and recently the social media interface (social media is not high on my wish list), add zimlets and it is a very nice product. In ZCS5.x the documents feature was limited but had great promise. This was a product that looked like it might take on Google Documents but let me use on-premises solution rather than use the cloud (on-premises is required for me). Version 6.x seemed to be adding more of these features and improving on them. Then version 7 dropped the continued improvements in documents but added more in IM. Now version 8 appears to be dropping more features and trending more towards just another email server and web client solution, which Zimbra does pretty well, but then so do plenty of other solutions. If Zimbra loses more of what made it unique, especially on-premises, then there will be little reason not to look at gmail, arguably a cheaper solution with many more features and benefits. Maybe Zimbra doesn't think people use these features because they do not get any feedback about them, maybe people use them and do not have to complain because they just work as expected, maybe... Hopefully Zimbra will realise what makes it unique and reverse these decisions to drop some of this functionality.
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