Zimbra

This version of Zimbra Desktop brings us close to a full suite of online & offline features, definitely try it out. Incase you’ve missed all the new stuff packed into previous editions, stop by the respective blog entries on Beta 4 & Beta 3.

We are very excited to announce the arrival of sharing in Zimbra Desktop for ZCS accounts!

• This is currently done by proxying, so no data of guest mailboxes are downloaded/cached offline to the local computer.



• Existing users may need to ‘trigger sync’. Simply edit the mountpoint online using the web-client (such as renaming it) to force availability in Zimbra Desktop. This is because mailbox sync is token based, and for data types newly introduced in desktop we don’t go back in time to acquire them. (Additionally, creating shares from the desktop client will be addressed with the ZCS 5.0.12 release.)
• Pushing change notifications to the UI when working with shared content is no small task, even for the ZCS server/client. The team managed to address delegate store/shared folder updates and even implemented cross-server notification support, eliminating the need for manual refreshes.

Of course the enhancements don’t stop there:

• Everyone raved about this in our Yahoo! Calendar Beta front-end, so it was time to bring the feature into play for Zimbra Desktop - introducing “Fisheye” view:




• Yahoo! & Google Calendar Sync - it’s all about CalDAV. (Give the new Yahoo! Calendar powered by Zimbra a spin.)

 

• Beta 4 added address book integration for Ymail accounts, and Beta 5 extends that to Gmail users. Enable in account setup; actual contacts vs auto added ‘emailed contacts’ distinction is underway.



• Built-in Inquisitor support for the web search bar - bringing you fast lookups, auto-complete, and search history. (If you are not familiar with Inquisitor, or want to add it to another browser, you can read about it here.) To change preference settings use shift+F6 to reveal the status bar, click on the gear in the lower right, then choose Tools > Add-ons, and go to the Extensions tab; you can even toggle the search engine used.
• Revamped import/export UI available in preferences for easier access - which helps you add iCalendars and contacts from comma-separated-value format. It even provides a quick backup using the previously covered tar formatter; that’s also useful for ZCS-to-ZCS migrations, as it contains both account info and items plus associated metadata.
  
  
• Streamlined layout for the account configuration menu.
• SSL enforcement - we now detect invalid/untrusted/mismatched certificates and prompt the user if they still wish to proceed.

Grab it via auto-update, build from source, or for those just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time: You can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

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Have an idea for extending Zimbra Desktop? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.

Admins in the U.S got a chance to talk shop at EDUCAUSE and the LISA ‘08 summit, but what about those in Europe? Don’t despair, because we’re co-hosting a mini-conference with MySQL, SchoolForge, RedHat, Sun, Op5, and Fusis at our UK headquarters in London on November 27th.

While the presentations are specifically aimed at education as well as the non-profit sector, anyone is welcome to attend. Engage us in discussions about your thoughts on the latest technology, how it blends with your school’s ICT strategy, or tackle open source trends for the future. Details on the schedule are over at OpenSourceInSchools.org.uk (of course registration is free, and besides providing the specifics it also gets you a complimentary lunch).

Just a bit on new stuff that’s graced the Zimlet scene lately:

Xythos
Drag and drop your emails (including entire conversations with meta-data or just the attachments) from Zimbra into an Xythos folder of your choosing. Create new emails and link to documents stored on an Xythos content management server for internal accounts - you can even configure expiring tickets to share material with external users.

See it in action here, then contact info@xythos.com if you’d like to try it out.

Dimdim
Join a Dimdim web conference without leaving your inbox; start a meeting right from an email with a single click, drag contacts from your address book, or even drop any appointments in your calendar onto the Zimlet and instantly schedule a Dimdim session.

Dimdim is an awesome open source meeting platform that lets you share your presentations, documents, whiteboards, or desktop (currently Win & Mac with Linux on the roadmap) - and gets you connected via chat, VoIP, or webcam. Run your own server, use their hosted options, or create a free account that lets you connect with up to twenty people at once - attendees don’t even need to be registered.

Grab the Zimet here.

Alfresco
The first content management Zimlet by Starxpert let you save emails, conversations with attachments, or folders onto an Alfresco space.

A newly developed Zimlet from the folks at Alfresco not only helps you save content to ECM server, but also provides the ability to select multiple documents and attach them as links to outgoing emails; several widgets give you ease-of-use in Alfresco space selection and repository navigation. Visit the gallery page to download it.

Get your intent across.
With the new Babelfish Translator & Dictionary Zimlets:



Check them out in the source, they’re coming to your server’s “zimlets-extra” folder shortly - you can even use them in Zimbra Desktop.



 
Auto-Complete & Refined Search

Available in the main branch of perforce are com_zimbra_searchauto & searchrefine. While an updated Yahoo! search Zimlet displays results in a ZmApp tab instead of requiring you to open another browser window.

 

 

 

 

If you’re attending the Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego this week, Steve Hillman (one of our community moderators hailing from Simon Fraser University) is holding a “Birds-of-a-Feather” session on Wednesday, November 12th. Details are here, with more on LISA - from technical workshops to streaming presentation and keynote feeds over here.

For those who didn’t get a chance to join us at EDUCAUSE, some of the panel speakers have posted their presentations; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gave one on the question: Can One Institutional Calendar, Used Creatively, Boost Retention? Which covers their PantherLink system (powered by Zimbra).

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Going to this year’s LISA conference? Drop us a line below if you want to meet-up and discuss all things Zimbra.

Last year we brought shared mail folders into play to join the rest of the sharing possibilities ZCS offers, but we don’t want to overlook mentioning another feature in 5.0 that has some excellent use cases.

Let’s say you need to collaborate with an assistant (who of course manages everything for you). While sharing is recursive to sub-folders by default, depending on account structure it can mean several invites and checks to make sure everyone is seeing the proper info. Other cavets include the occasional inability for the sharee to mentally organize / conceptually visualize the sharer’s folder structure scheme, or the possible need to keep the permissions and mountpoints updated when content is moved a lot. Nothing stings like missing important information when someone shifts material into folders that aren’t actually shared according to plan; everyone can become instantly out-of-sync.

Admins know that sharing the entirety of an account can be achieved through modifyFolderGrant & createMountpoint requests. This process previously had a few downsides, like avoiding name conflicts when trying to mount the root of the account ‘all at once’ (fixed in ZCS 5.0.6+).

There are a few RFE’s in the works, such as the ability to share an entire mailbox in one click or to expose custom share roles end-user side. We’re also planning to bring clarity to your web of shares through a single-user share management UI followed by the larger share management and discovery and a new Zimlet as well, but there’s one other cool trick that’s here right now: Family Mailboxes

Don’t let the name deceive you - we’ve used the concept of parent/child relationships, yet this principle can easily apply to any primary/secondary setup such as boss/secretary, professor/assistants, or manager/co-worker/peers; where sharing of passwords is inappropriate or you don’t want another browser session open, yet you still need full control. (Wildcard sub-domains aren’t for everyone, and an additional browser can equal a bit more memory used.)

To get started via CLI (if you’re an end-user ask your admin about configuring it):
zmprov ga secondary@domain.com | grep zimbraId
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

We also want the secondary account visible in the accordion UI of the primary:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraPrefChildVisibleAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

(The primary user can also set this later from their AJAX client preferences tab.)
 
Just like how the Zimbra Desktop’s UI works, you now have access to mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, notebooks, briefcase items, and even preferences of the secondary account:



A few notes:

• As shown above - when replying from an account that’s not yours, emails include a header designating who it was really sent by & “on behalf of” is displayed. It’s also shown as unread in the sent folder of the account owner so they’re made aware of it.
• This is a little different than permissions & mountpoints - so you’ll have to use normal shares if you need access in other end-clients; it requires the AJAX interface for functionality, and currently isn’t available in the HTML web-client.
• Don’t go overboard on visible secondary accounts, our share model covers almost every situation; but as many organizations have a few crucial duos or teams who need to be on the same page every moment - this is there for those who have no time to mess with share permissions and need to manage other users, or perhaps desire complete control in a hosted family account.

To remove, simply replace the plus sign with a minus:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com -zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

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Have other ideas to improve work flow or make Zimbra family friendly? (Like parental mail screening, the ability for end-users to provision in HSP situations, or even admin console settings?) Then let us know below or drop in over at the community forums.

EDUCAUSE 08 that is.

We’re big proponents of bringing the latest technology to students and faculty, because countless organizations enjoy using our software in the classroom - as both a communication tool and to teach. So of course we’ll be at this year’s annual EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando, FL from Oct 28th to 31st.

If you’re going, be sure to swing by booth #213 to chat about the future of collaboration, grab a bite to eat with us at Seasons 52 Grill on Wednesday evening (contact us if you’re interested), and drop in for “Feel the Spirit” on Thursday night; which we are co-hosting this year over at Universal Studio’s CityWalk.

If you missed the Xythos webinar yesterday we’ll have the screencast up soon, but you can also play with their awesome new Zimlet in booth #833.

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Be sure to check out the events page for more info, and to see other places we’ll be.

A year an a half ago the (tiny) Yahoo! Calendar team embarked on a mission to build a new Calendar. We were interested in cracking the consumer market where huge potential for growth and innovation lay. The problem was that the 10 year old platform was falling apart and being held together by bungee cord and tape. Innovation on this platform would have been very challenging and forever handicap our efforts going forward.

Zimbra came into the Yahoo! fold and along with it a huge opportunity (large short-term technical challenges as well!) Zimbra’s underlying technology is ripe for customization, and the Yahoo! Calendar Team dove in and came up with some fantastic results.

The all new Yahoo! Calendar Beta is running an a Zimbra back-end which has been embedded into the Yahoo! architecture, with a brand-spanking new front-end composed of JSP enhancements, a new taglib, YUI, and of course AJAX.

 

This is an early beta product where we focused on getting the fundamentals right first. In coming releases expect to see some exciting enhancements. Our Flickr integration is a hint at where we are taking calendaring; its functionality exposes the power of calendars to be a window to discovering interesting events and content, as well as a window to the past.

      

The teams working together from one code repository was an awesome experience, and this cooperation will continue to bring much more innovation across the Yahoo! network. Lots of great calendar code and ideas have come out of this collaboration, look for some in upcoming ZCS releases or check some out in the main branch in perforce.

How can you get on board early? Just visit: switch.calendar.yahoo.com

Checkout some screencasts of the new calendar in action is here, and a video of Scott Dietzen discussing it on All things Digital.

What else are we up to? John Holder is playing host for CalConnect Roundtable XIII this week at one of Yahoo!’s campuses in Santa Carla, CA - we’re collaborating with some big corporations including Sun, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, Kerio, as well as some major university’s to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

 

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Herbert Wang is a Product Manager on the Zimbra-Yahoo! Calendaring Team.

Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 added a wealth of new features to our offline capable client, and Beta 4 expands upon it’s good taste.

Build 1338 introduces:

Global Address List access against a ZCS server (both proxy and sync).

Free-busy information proxy for ZCS users, to assist in finding that open timeslot on your colleague’s calendar.

Archiving: Users can now move items under “Local Folders” should they need to keep their server mailbox size under quota, or just wish to not sync certain items.

Resource & Location scheduling UI for Zimbra accounts.

Yahoo! Address Book integration: Another frequent request - you can enable contact sync under Setup > Account Settings.

Microsoft Live/Hotmail Plus: This one was not even on the book, but we decided to implement mail sync via the JDAVMail API and a custom setup wizard just for the kick of it.

In addition to secure cookie auth, we managed to implement complete SSL for all IMAP communication with Yahoo! accounts as well.

Various UI changes to support the new enhancements, and latest code to go along with the parallel ZCS 5.0.10 release.

Per your excellent feedback, calendar sync integration with several providers is coming soon. Enjoy this release!

If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

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Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.

One of the more nifty features to grace the Zimbra scene recently is the interoperability framework for sharing two-way free/busy information with other server platforms.

Since we released the framework APIs and the reference implementation against Microsoft’s Exchange 2003 (previously covered) there has been a lot of interest from customers and community (interop works with both Open Source and Network Edition).

Argonne National Labs has given excellent feedback culminating in a few enhancements for ZCS 5.0.10. We also recently got a wonderful thank you note from the University of Pennsylvania, who teamed up with the folks over at Sumatra Development to handle some calendar migrations. They were impressed at how well their multi-domain environment behaved, and shared a link to a configuration tip for Exchange 2007. It’s great to see the community enhance, extend, and tweak the open source interop framework.

That type of integration cohesiveness frequently makes Zimbra relevant to organizations in the same way that other open source business application are: often initially at the division level, and then spreading within the enterprise. (Penn breaks their IT into “local support providers” to better serve each school’s specialized needs.) For immense corporations wanting to switch from software such as Exchange, Lotus, Meeting Maker, or other third-parties that interact with our API, picking a new platform can be a massive undertaking - having interop can mean a safe departmental decision.

Admins out there can certainly attest the the headaches involved with maintaining different server infrastructures, but it also works in reverse - that ’stubborn group’ which doesn’t want to switch or the ‘peer organization running different software’ can now seamlessly communicate as one.

Someone in the forums recently asked about ways to migrate individual accounts from one ZCS instance to another, so thought I’d share the enlightenment with all. Whether you are going from an on-premise install to a hosting provider, want to create handy archives of old employee accounts, or just need to duplicate mailbox contents of a user; the syntax in this article proves remarkably useful, and applies to all editions.

There are a multitude of comparable RFE’s on addressing this need via different approaches. (Bugzilla entries 19630, 29573, 28443 & 30163 to name a few.) Some want graphical tools to browse data and selectively migrate certain things, while others would be happy with a cross LDAP zmmailboxmove.

Depending on your situation, several backup tools can take care of a large portion of your daily needs; and there are ways to do Zimbra-to-Zimbra migrations using the Network Edition’s backup and restore capabilities - however they require admin abilities on both systems. Meanwhile, most of the frequently used open source backup solutions are simply an “all accounts at-once” approach. So what to do when you need to move from your personal setup to a hosting provider? Or if you’re a hosting provider, move a tiny handful of accounts to a separate infrastructure? Before diving into the wiki on user migration for info on Imapsync, REST exports, CURL imports, etc; there’s a handy way to avoid the “one item type at-a-time” transfer methods.

In ZCS 5.0.9+ you can export an entire mailbox with:
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com getRestURL “//?fmt=tgz” > /tmp/account.tgz

Next transfer via rsync, scp, sftp, etc. You’ll also need to create the account on the 2nd server if the desired account doesn’t exist at your destination server yet.

Then import with:
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com postRestURL “//?fmt=tgz&resolve=reset” /tmp/account.tgz

The resolve= paramater has several options:

• “skip” ignores duplicates of old items, it’s also the default conflict-resolution.
• “modify” changes old items.
• “reset” will delete the old subfolder (or entire mailbox if /).
• “replace” will delete and re-enter them.

‘Reset’ will be a bit faster on an empty destination mailbox because it skips most dupe checks.

Note: There were some duplication fixes and additional issues (mainly sync related) corrected with the tar formatter in 5.0.10.

Not a Zimbra Admin? Users can get the same zip/tar formatter on REST URL’s by visiting:
http:// server.domain.com/home/user?fmt=zip&query=is:anywhere

The zip format has been around for a long time, but doesn’t contain account & item metadata like the tar formatter automatically does:
http:// server.domain.com/home/user/?fmt=tgz

Infact, this same technique is currently used in Zimbra Desktop’s alpha backup solution.

If this approach doesn’t scale performance wise for your situation, or you simply don’t want to have everyone hit a REST URL for 30GB mailboxes all at the same time, here’s a collection of helpful scripts and other ways to systematically migrate:

Mysqldump & rsync with an interesting blob management technique: Zimbra2Zimbra

Imapsync for mail + postRestURL for contacts, calendar & filters: ZimbraMigrate (Expand the concept for tasks, documents, and briefcase items.)

Another method that could be extrapolated upon for migrations: Per User Mailbox Backup (OE Version - Zimbra :: Wiki)

Most of these solutions aren’t going to respect share permissions, but when pulling an account out of an environment that’s to be expected.

Zimlet spin-offs:
- Mail backup options for end users (.eml)
- Zimlet to save email in a txt file (.txt or html)

The above Zimlets are aimed at making quick self-copies & not for restores, but there are many methods for putting messages back into Zimbra, including tools like zmmailbox addMessge, zmlmtpinject, CURL, etc; for more info checkout these threads: Recover data from store folders & Moving Folders between users

If moving your entire server, I’m a huge fan of the install.sh -s trick when using NE backups to do so isn’t an option.

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Have another method you’d like to share? Document it in the wiki & note it below, or you can discuss over in the Community Forums.