Testing if the Giraffe likes the Apples

Just out of curiosity, I’ve downloaded Zarafa’s VMware Demo-Image and ran it on my Fusion, to see how far Zarafa’s Groupware-Suite already is. While clicking through the web-interface and the product’s documentation, I read something about Z-Push – a re-implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveSync. I was wonderning, if it’s already possible to connect my iPod Touch to the Zarafa Groupware by creating a new “Microsoft Exchange” account on the iPod itself.

So, after I’ve reconfigured the Demo VM to speak SSL, I created two different Groupware users and created the account for the first user on my iPod. I only tested the whole product using the E-Mail sync-service – since I did not wanted to lose my existing contacts or calendar entries – and configured “Push” for the new Exchange account. With the credentials of the second user, I logged-in via Zarafa’s (damn ugly) web-interface and wrote an e-mail to the first user, while having my iPod Touch lying on my table, unlocked, in “Home”-screen. The second I clicked the “Send”-button within the browser-window was the second in which a new badge popped up on my iPod, telling me that I have one unread E-Mail.

So actually the whole Zarafa/Exchange/Push stuff seem to work pretty good, though I don’t know yet how reliable it is. I will test this out a bit longer some time, because if it works the way it should, I could really think of using Zarafa on my private E-Mail account. Nor the world’s most advanced operating system‘s E-Mail client neither the iPod support IMAP IDLE yet, what makes it pretty uncomfortable when waiting for new E-Mails.

But eh.