Most successful open source projects started out as open source. Zimbra took a different path: We cranked code for nearly two years in stealth mode before making the first public release of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in open source in August of ’05. Since then, of course, it’s been a wild ride: Zimbra is now arguably the most popular open source technology in its category of messaging and collaboration servers. Zimbra’s success has led to inquiries from the owners of existing closed source software that are considering open source as a means to replicate that success.
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(Caveat: this is indeed a retread, but the original content has been sufficiently revised that I’m electing to republish.)
While most of the Web 2.0 focus has been on the consumer (Zimbra being a notable exception), I visited a large corporation (call it Acme) that was working on their response to these new technologies and business models, and calling the overall effort “Acme 2.0″. Ouch. (On the choice of name, that is—I think the effort is a fine idea.) My fear is that like “.Com” before it, Web 2.0 is at risk of overheating as a buzz word. I think we are seeing this in some of the softer marketing slogans such as “Collaborative Web” or “Live Web”.
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Owen our UI and CSS guru has been hard at work the last couple weeks revamping our UI skin framework. In the next release it’s trivial to define a color palette and generate the CSS required to re-skin or re-color Zimbra. As part of this the basic skins that ship with Zimbra require little or no images to create the layout. Initial tests have shown that Zimbra actually performs slightly faster since it doesn’t need to load/render images for all the round corners and UI effects. Two of the new skins that will ship with ZCS 3.2 are ‘Sand’ and ‘Sky’.
 
Got a skin or color set you’d like to see in the next release. Add a comment with some colors and a name and it may be the newest Zimbra skin!
A little belated but with the recent release of Zimbra’s 3.1 Collaboration Suite the Outlook Connector has reached General Availability. We’ve put together a short whitepaper which details the advantages of Zimbra’s Connector for Outlook (ZCO).
- True synchronization and quick offline switching. ZCO syncs in the background and doesn’t require any extra steps to go offline.
- Completely asynchronous user interaction. No delays or pauses as user’s interact with Outlook.
- Native standards based security, and compatibility using SOAP/XML over HTTP/HTTPS
Zimbra Outlook Connector (32kb PDF)
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