Technical Advantages

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’s open source groupware 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 (SELinux).

• 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.

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.