Bad Giraffe

So, the other night I was stoked that I found Zarafa, an Open Source server that emulated a Microsoft Exchange and had ActiveSync push.  I wanted to give it a shot because this would mean that I could host my own calendar and contacts server, with push capability to my iPhone.  Wouldn't that be cool? The feature set on paper looks fantastic:

• Microsoft Exchange "drop-in" replacement (their words).
• Full Microsoft Outlook compatibility through their own client.
• Web access through a rich AJAX client.
• iCalendar support for synchronizing 3rd party calendaring products (like Mozilla Lightning and Apple iCal).
• ActiveSync push (ie. iPhone push support for me).

• The web interface is nice.  It acts a lot like Microsoft's Exchange OWA.  The interface is also very limited in that you can manage your data, but you cannot export or import data from the interface.
• In order to import calendar data, I had to use Lightning with their iCalendar support.  I was able to get calendaring data into Zarafa.  But...
• The iCalendar support is awful.  Once the data was in, half of it could not be pulled out by the iCalendar support.  The data looked fine in the web access interface and also with Outlook.  iCalendar support is borked in 6.20.
• This is more an issue with Outlook than Zarafa, but there's no way of bulk importing vcf contact data that I could find.  In Outlook, I had to import contacts one by one.
• Other than Outlook, there seems to be no way of getting data out of Zarafa.  That's unfortunate since there are so many Open Source and open standards based solutions available.
• The Outlook Client software from Zarafa is what ties Outlook with the Zarafa server.  The client is tied, version-wise to the version of the server.  So, if any company were to do a big Outlook install using Zarafa server, they would have to install the client on all the boxes.  Worse yet, if they upgraded their Zarafa server, they'd have to go back and upgrade all the Outlook Client software to match.
• ActiveSync actually works and works well.  The only thing missing is support for multiple calendars.  If you create a second "folder" (ie. calendar), it will not get pushed to a mobile device.