Mission Critical Email

Professional Services

Mission Critical Email provides fixed-price and project-based Professional Services to Zimbra Partners and Zimbra Customers.

For Zimbra Partners
We offer the same services to Zimbra Partners that we do to Zimbra Customers, but at 15% below the Customer rates.  We do this to enable you, as a Zimbra Partner, to white-label or resell our professional services to your customer base without the need to domicile expensive Zimbra-expert engineering talent within your company and to make margin by pricing our Professional Services to your customers at our Customer rates.

We are able to offer these reduced rates based on the lower pre-sales costs we have experienced in previous engagements for other Zimbra Partners.

For Zimbra Customers
Zimbra software, when deployed properly, generally runs trouble-free for years.  While this stability is of course a good thing, it does tempt customers to defer appropriate maintenance, tune-ups, patching and upgrades for way too long.  Staff changes often mean that the engineer who initially deployed Zimbra is no longer available, and the end-result typically is a “bad surprise” in the form of an exploit, a system crash or just general, seemingly inexplicable, performance degradation.  We can help!

Zimbra Support is for break-fix tasks, getting clarity on documentation and other general questions, and for submitting Bugs and Requests for Enhancements.  Zimbra Support does not cover monthly maintenance tasks (patching and upgrades), performance tuning, disaster recovery planning etc. We have a variety of fixed-price and a la carte Support offerings that free your IT staff to focus on more pressing tasks; leave the planning and execution of Zimbra monthly maintenance, upgrades and disaster recovery planning to us.

Fixed-Price Zimbra Upgrades
Be honest… you have done one or two Zimbra upgrades/migrations every few years, right?  We do multiple upgrades/migrations every quarter – referred to us by Zimbra themselves for some of their Direct customers, for other Zimbra Partners and for Zimbra Customers.  Why then spend ages trying to become a Zimbra expert and risk not getting the upgrade done quite right when you can outsource the job at an attractive price and lower your risk at the same time?

For $1,995, we’ll perform a side-by migration of your old Zimbra single server to a new Zimbra server running the latest version of Zimbra and configured using the best practices we have developed over more than a decade of being a Zimbra Partner.  These proprietary best practices have been developed and deployed in both small Zimbra systems and in multi-server environments hosting more than 20,000 email domains.  Many of Zimbra’s default settings are essentially a “blank canvas”, so our best practices comprise (among other things):

  • Providing a system architecture to improve performance and avoid over-resourcing the server(s)
  • Changing many of Zimbra’s default settings to market-proven values,
  • Configuring sensible anti-spam to enhance effectiveness while minimizing false positives,
  • Deploying a number of non-intrusive security improvements.

Included in the price is some discovery/consulting (to make sure we set things like password lockout policies in conformance with your company’s security guidelines), and some informal Zimbra Administrator training to provide a smooth handoff and introduction to many of the new features in the latest Zimbra release.

If you have a multi-server environment, just add $395 for each additional server you have now.  Please note the migration techniques we use enable resizing of your multi-server environment as part of the migration.  If your current Zimbra servers are bulging at the seams we can add more servers to the new environment and spread your mailboxes accordingly.  If you are currently over-resourced, we can reduce the number of servers in the new environment.  Regardless, you will likely see performance enhancements simply on account of  adopting our deployment best practices in your new environment.

There are some caveats of course, so fill in the form below so we can get you a formal quote and you can review the fine print.

Bespoke Professional Services for Zimbra Projects
Many Zimbra Partners and Customers have unique situations where a fixed-price upgrade is not feasible, or simply have a Zimbra-related project they need help with.  Mission Critical Email’s proprietor has completed numerous custom engagements like:

  • Saving a Zimbra customer $50,000 per year by replacing a separate document management system with Zimbra’s Briefcase, and leveraging the check-out, check-in feature built in to Zimbra.
  • Working with a large web hosting company to automate Zimbra domain and mailbox provisioning and deprovisioning.
  • Training a Managed Services Provider to use customized Classes of Service to resell Zimbra mailboxes at various price points to better meet their customers’ needs.

Ready to start a Professional Services conversation or need a quote?  Fill in the form and let’s get started!