So in the last month, the Zimbra engineers have been flooded with emails and phone calls from recruiters offering them jobs. This is very flattering. For two reasons, one its flattering because in the valley there are so many hot companies and so many hot engineers - but I guess Zimbra is now the breeding ground for talent. Second, as soon as these messages arrive - our engineers forward it around and are not tempted to leave a small fantastic startup to go work for a big company especially ones where recruiters blindly spam everyone. The latest rounds of recruiting spam to our engineers came from Mark Jennings who has a microsoft email address and there have been numerous recruiting calls from Google as well….
So that brings us to how we got the talent that we have and how we retain them. First - very high standards in recruiting, very tough interview process and, most importantly, word of mouth (no recruiters). Second, at Zimbra you work with the best and the brightest and are challenged everyday - its an honor to come to work everyday. Third, its the chance to lead a revolution in computing. Here we find ourselves at the crossroads of an internet revolution again - and in some small but definite way Zimbra is leading at least one battle. Finally, this is a fun culture - we definitely work hard and play harder and we all know each other personally as well as professionally. So that all brings us back to this question of how long before we start losing people…. I think we will lose people for one reason alone - we grow too big and our culture starts sucking (I won’t be here then either). But we will lose people to other startups, to new startups as I am confident that the kinds of people we have here at Zimbra have no interest at all in being in a company where they don’t influence the culture, direction and product strategy. They are all entrepreneurs by heart …..
The new end user flash demo has been posted on the web site. This version features:
* Enterprise mashups: Skype and Google maps
* Calendar drag and drop, sashing
* Delegated & shared calendars
* RSS feeds
Additionally, the core functionality modules have been updated to highlight new features in the latest release.
Zimbra
You can download an offline zip of the latest demo here.
I get lots of questions about adding AjaxTk UI components (a.k.a. DWT components) to existing HTML content. This is actually fairly easy to do. You can find an example of how right here
One of our community member’s FunkyPenguin posted a zimbra group on Frapper. Let’s you report where Zimbra is being used. Have you installed Zimbra or are using it. Post your location. Let’s see just how far around the world Zimbra has traveled.
Where is Zimbra?
As it is realized within Zimbra and most other Ajax applications today, development is accomplished via GUI, object-oriented programming in Javascript. (Please see Ajax Programming Report Card and Ajax Sweet Spots.) This is the sort of work that developers with Java SWT, Java Swing, or C# skills will accel in at, but also the sort of work that will leave some Web designers (e.g., Dreamweaver or Frontpage users that have not dabbled in OO programming) scratching their heads. The success of technologies like PHP, ASP, and JSP is that they helped bridge the gap between UI “programming” and UI “designing.”
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Been quiet here on the blog, but quite the opposite here inside Zimbra. We opened up CVS for those who want to live on the edge. We’ve also released the first beta of our Outlook Connector. Those of you trying the new Outlook support you can comment and discuss it here.
Today we also posted our first developer builds. Perfect for those of you who want to use or test as-it-happens intermediate fixes and features. You’ll now get to test with us. We plan to post developer builds approximately once a week. These builds are the same builds that we are running internally at Zimbra (ie our @zimbra.com email addresses). So they are good enough to *use* where use is a *very* loose term. These builds are great if you want to check on that recently fixed bug or get a preview of what’s coming next. We look forward to your feedback in the developer forum.
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