Zimbra

It’s that time of year again and we are making our way to Denver for the annual EDUCAUSE conference.

We’ve got lots to talk about this year – not only did we cross a huge milestone, reaching 50 million paid mailboxes in less than four years, but we’ve continued to expand our reach in the Edu community (which alone is comprised of millions of paid mailboxes).  New Edu customers this year alone include Eastern Michigan University, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Marietta College, Saint Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Findlay, and Wayne State University.

All of our Edu customers benefit from Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, and many are contributing their own custom mash-ups to make Zimbra’s online tools work for best for them. Institutions like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Simon Fraser University are creating special Zimlets to better serve their students and faculty. You can read more about their specific case studies in our back to school blog series.

Other recent mash-ups include DimDim’s application tab (pictured below), which allow users to access DimDim’s web conferencing services from within Zimbra. Additionally, a new social media Zimlet enables users to read and post tweets to Twitter, or make updates to Facebook and Digg from directly within the ZCS, without having to take the time to visit other websites.

This year we will be joined at the conference by Zimbra customers University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech who will be speaking about how Zimbra has streamlined collaboration across their institutions and discuss how implementing a collaborative email and calendar provider can be extremely cost-effective.

If you are going to be at the conference, don’t forget to check out their panel on Friday, November 6th and please stop by and visit us at booth #332. We will be giving away some great prizes!

One of the best parts of being open source is seeing the ingenuity of our community. This year we’d like to see how you can use Zimbra themes to make your skin crawl this Halloween…

We’ve mocked up two new designs just in time for witching hour, and hope to get these into the gallery soon, but we’d also like to inspire you to put your Zimbra in a costume!

 
Do you prefer the fun of creepy pumkins, spiders, witches, bats, and black cats? Or is the dark brooding theme with a graveyard and crows more spooky? Vote for your favorite here. The Halloween skin with the most votes will be added to our permanent collection by one of our engineers.

 

Rick found an frightening skull that fit the folder tree well, and he’s already coded it into a downloadable theme – to quote one person’s take: “I couldn’t use it for very long without the hairs on the back of my neck tingling, that face is scary.”

 
Don’t forget, there are plenty of other skins that let your Zimbra play dress up all year long… Halloween isn’t the only time of year when it’s ok to pretend to be someone else!

Are you more of a race car driver, a pretty princess, or work in ACU’s and just can’t get enough digital cammo in your email?

Make your Zimbra reflect your mood or keep things interesting with the skin changer Zimlet, which switches themes automatically using whatever frequency preference you set. For even more variety, why not design your own custom theme!

Tell us what other seasonal themes you’d like to see next, even if their half a year away. Prefer a more traditional fall scheme of changing leaves and landscapes? Checkout what others are doing over in the fourms.

Zimbra’s massive user base means our new product releases reach farther than ever before. How far? Consider our 50 million paid mailbox count. With that comes the responsibility to make our solutions exactly what people need when it comes to shaping the future of communication.

So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

 

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3^rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.

 

But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25^th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.

 

We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

 

 

Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs.  “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get the latest version of the Social Zimlet from the Gallery

Thanks again for all your support and feedback; hope you enjoy ZCS 6.0!
Network Edition server download | Open Source Edition server download

 

You can also find a bit more about what’s new in ZCS 6 on the Zimbra website.

In part three of this series, we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bruce has been an esteemed advocate for Zimbra since the campus switched over to our offerings two years ago. If you recall, we highlighted some of UWM’s creations in our original post, including their White Pages, Availability, Help Tool, and Subscription Center Zimlets. We recently caught up with them to get the low down on Zimbra happenings across campus.

Read more from our Q&A with Bruce below:

How many people are using Zimbra on campus?
Approximately 50,000 users since last summer. Practically every department had a different setup. We recently had our fourth Microsoft Exchange migration, this time with University Police, and they are already productively utilizing Zimbra as their email and calendaring tool. We also had three Groupwise environments migrate, and they had very few issues after conversion.

What’s your favorite thing about Zimbra?
Given the state of the economy and our budget, the favorite thing for me is that I am able to deploy services for mail and calendar for 50k accounts with under three full time employees total, all staffing included. The system administrators who formally supported distributed Exchange and Groupwise environments have now been able to focus on higher value added services for our faculty.

What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve gotten since deployment?
That’s easy. The calendar has been a strong focus since the start, and our end-users really appreciate that we now have a fully enterprise calendar linking faculty, staff, and students in one integrated environment. We have connected the calendar with our other sources, such as our course management tool, student system, and tutoring/mentoring scheduler; everyone has responded very favorably to each new feature.

Have any institutional issues been solved or mitigated since introducing Zimlets?
We have a big test ahead of us this fall with the debut of our Subscription Center Zimlet. We expect it to have a positive impact on student retention through the ability to better organize all aspects of the lives of new students from the first day they show up on campus. I can’t wait to see the results.

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You can get further insight about UWM’s deployment here. Need help with your own concept – or have an design idea for extending Zimbra? Let us know over in the forums.

In our first post of the series, we highlighted a few of the recent creations coming out of Wayne State University – their Broadcast, AccessID, and Anti-Phishing Zimlets. Given the unique customization abilities, there are many reasons and motives behind every Zimlet’s conception. So, we decided to check in with Systems Analyst Rob Thompson, to provide some context behind their latest extensions.

Highlights from our Q&A with Rob are below:

How long have you been running Zimbra?
The university started evaluating mail systems in earnest during the 1st quarter of 2008. We went full production for all of our 70,000 users in June 2009.

What’s your favorite Zimlet and why?
One of the most popular is our AccessID Zimlet. Our previous email system did not have an extensible API that would allow us to integrate our directory information into email content. Zimbra’s ability to create context-sensitive events allows our users to mouse-over an internal WSU ID number (which are quite cryptic) and instantly retrieve a name, department, phone, email address, and other data from our directory about the referenced user.

Were there any campus issues in particular that inspired you to leverage mashups?
Integration with student content applications and existing frameworks are where we are seeing the most demand, and thus where we are focusing our development. This includes L-Soft Listserv, a home-grown announcement service, class schedule information and more. Since going live, we have had a steady stream of requests to leverage external systems into the Zimbra user interface. Many of these projects are already well underway.

What are students and/or faculty saying about your Zimlets?
Since we’re very early on in our rollout, every compliment seems to come with another request for more integration work! In the past we have had to turn these requests down, as they were simply not possible with the software at hand. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us, and are very excited to have the opportunity to accomplish them with Zimbra.

   

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Stay tuned for part three. To answer some common questions from our first entry: A few of the Zimlets mentioned aren’t available in the gallery, since they are written in a way that interacts with specific back-end systems at each institution. Where possible the authors are working to separate usable code for the broader benefit of all. In the meantime, you can get help with connectors like these and your own ideas over in the community forums.

Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The position will be responsible for developer events, training, documentation and ensuring that developers have all they need to make use of the rich APIs Zimbra offers.

- Our forum with over 27,000 members http://www.zimbra.com/forums/

- Our company/developer blog http://www.zimbrablog.com/

- Our developer and admin wiki http://wiki.zimbra.com/

- Our public bug database http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/

- Our public community driven roadmap http://pm.zimbra.com/

- Our web mash-up extensions (zimlet) gallery http://gallery.zimbra.com/

You can apply directly on the job posting here:

http://careers.yahoo.com/jdescription.php?oid=24060

If you have more questions of have someone in mind who you think would be a good fit please feel free to email me.

KevinH at Zimbra.com

-kevin

It’s September, which signals the time students will be returning to school. At Zimbra, this means continuing our work with the more than 500 institutions that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. We are thrilled to help educators and students alike with their communication needs in over 33 countries, including institutions such as Kansas State, Texas A & M, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.

With “back-to-school” in the air, we thought it was an appropriate time to check in on some of our education customers. Turns out, Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, compatibility with other email clients and campus systems, open technologies, easy branding, administrator-friendly architecture, in both hosted and on-premise deployment options aren’t the only reasons why Zimbra continues to be the #1 choice for education. Today, schools are growing contributors to our highly regarded Zimlet program. With customized mash-ups, more and more educational institutions at all levels are taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source roots and community, by easily integrating ZCS with other online tools that students and faculty interact with daily.

A few universities have recently shared with us some examples of useful implementations:

Wayne State University
Message Authenticity Zimlet: Helps the student confirm the authenticity of a message sent by Wayne administration. Users may choose alternative delivery methods and rate the message’s importance relevance to them in order to provide feedback for future news updates.
AccessID Zimlet: This hover-over Zimlet provides users with a quick look into the university directory, making sense of arcane user ID codes.
Anti-Phishing Zimlet: Beyond just marking something as spam, this Zimlet allows users to report an email as a serious phishing attempt into an automatic tickiting system, so that Wayne administrators can research if other users have inadvertently provided personal information when they shouldn’t, and then report back to the campus about any complaint to be aware of.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Subscription Center Zimlet: This Zimlet acts as the single source for consolidated public calendar information enabling users to search, browse, and subscribe to assorted campus and community calendars.
White Pages Zimlet: This Zimlet integrates an existing directory server to provide various phone number, office location, and home address information of students, faculty, and staff, based on their existing privacy settings.
Help Zimlet: Gives users quick access to custom tailored documentation for the campus community as well as video screencasts demonstrating how to use and configure various features of the Zimbra web interface.

Simon Fraser University
Course Resources/mySFU Zimlet: Content put out by professors for a specific class, and also connects to details on course books, library records, campus news, and more.
Tips & Tricks Zimlet: A customized interface with a daily tidbit of useful info for getting the most out of the Zimbra experience as well as computing accross campus.
Broadcast Alert Zimlet: Gets the word out to anyone with Zimbra currently open or upon next login. With students on the system so often to get work done, it’s a great way to send a critical notice.

Stay tuned and we will continue the series with additional screenshots plus more in depth Q&A with a few Zimbra educational customers.

During the past 5 years, Zimbra has evolved from a software company selling nearly 100% direct to customers to a model today where well over half of our sales are generated through Zimbra partners.

The channel-focused evolution has been intentional; early on we realized working via Zimbra resellers, hosting partners and systems integrators is the best way Zimbra can satisfy our rapidly growing customer base’s wide-ranging requirements while continuing to grow efficiently.  With this model we’ve been able to increase the number of paid Zimbra customers to over 60,000 organizations, accounting for over 41 million paid mailboxes – the second largest number of paid mailboxes for any email/collaboration product in the U.S.

We certainly couldn’t help deploy or support this number of customers without the involvement of so many valuable Zimbra partners!

Our sales team certainly appreciates the leverage they gain by working hand-in-hand with channel partners.  Given that, we believe finding new ways to work even more closely together will enhance our mutual success and take us to the next level.

Today we’re pleased to take that next step forward by announcing a new Zimbra Partner Program, featuring:

• A new ‘Gold’ tier for our most advanced Zimbra partners
• An updated Partner Portal with new and updated documentation, sales tools and marketing resources
• Improved visibility for our top partners on the Zimbra website
• New opportunities for deal registration
• More Zimbra resources for co-marketing and selling

Please visit our partner website pages for further details (you may also contact or email our channels team).

In the meantime we’ve also been busy launching more than a dozen distribution relationships around the world to provide enhanced services to our network of VARs in the new Zimbra Partner Program.  These new Zimbra distributors include:

• United States: SYNNEX Corporation, as part of the Open Source Channel Alliance, co-sponsored by RedHat
• Europe:  Several distributors including COMMEO and D2B (France), Interactive Ideas (UK), VNC (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), VDEL (Russia and Eastern Europe), and Nordicmind (Scandanavia).
• Middle East & North Africa: Opennet MEA
• South Africa & Sub-Saharan Africa: Linux Warehouse
• Latin America: Red Hat
• Japan: We’re continuing our strong relationship with Sumitomo.

Some of the key VAR benefits from distributors include streamlined process for placing and fulfilling orders, dedicated account managers and communication channels for rapid support, and access to new payment and financing options.  Our sales team will continue to work directly with our VAR partners (and as often as needed, with the end customers).

We believe the new program is right in line with Zimbra’s objectives for 2009 and beyond: continue growing our customer base and revenues, raise customer satisfaction even higher, firmly establish Zimbra as the leading open collaboration platform for businesses, governments, academic institutions and service providers, and finally deliver more than 3/4ths of our revenue and services through our channel partners.

To our existing partners: We want to say again we greatly appreciate everything we’ve done together already and believe the best is yet to come!  We are already getting positive feedback, including Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix hosting who said, “We’re really excited to be a Zimbra Gold Partner. Positive customer feedback about our solution plus more resources from Zimbra combine to enable us to better sell the product to our target market.”

For those interested in partnering with Zimbra to resell, implement or host Zimbra, we look forward to hearing from you soon!

For the last post in the Power Zimlet Series (Attach Email, Ignore Conversations, Contact Organizer, Task Reminders), we are ending on a lighter note.

Zimlet 5: Emoticons in Email

Who doesn’t love emoticons? They are core part of life online and I admit am a huge fan of them.

Historically Zimbra has always supported emoticons – but only in IM.   For ZCS 6.0 (coming very soon) we have made some enhancements to the Zimlet platform (including the ability to create new ‘application tabs’) that enable us to now support emoticons in email compose as well.

When you write an email you can simply enter your standard text emoticon [example:   ], or now you can select an emoticon visually using a button in the compose window that will insert the text for you (see below).  When you receive an email, emoticon text is automatically displayed as an image.

Now, emoticons are great but occasionally you might not want to see emoticons in your email, may be because some code or some text that’s unintentionally matching emoticons. So, we have added “Temporarily Disable in Mail” to help disable emoticons. Right click on the Zimlet in the left pane, and select it, then reopen the email. Further, Double click on Zimlet in the over-view panel to permanently enable/disable it.

Enjoy!

PS: This will be shipped as a default Zimlet in ZCS 6.0.