The Dutch mobile messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has signed a framework agreement with the Catholic Church in Germany (Verband der Diözesen Deutschlands, VDD) to implement its collaboration platform.

This country wide contract, that includes enterprise service level agreements, allows the entire German Catholic Church to benefit from the better total cost of ownership and quality advantages of open source groupware.

The VDD decided to go with Zarafa's Collaboration Platform (ZCP) after a first reference installation with 3.850 users in Bavaria. Zarafa meets the demands of stable Outlook integration and WebAccess, smartphone support and full integration with the Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Helmuth Neuberger, CEO Zarafa Germany says: "The entire German Catholic Church can now use a sustainable open source collaboration platform. This framework allows them to purchase ZCP on special conditions without having to conduct a procurement process".

Zarafa teams up for this with Gold Partner Millenux, who adds its great experience in high availability computing and virtualisation, and Red Hat.

Zarafa and Millenux are both Red Hat Advanced Partners.