I had the pleasure of joining Motorola, SugarCRM, and Funambol on a panel at LinuxWorld regarding the future of mobility. The depressing bit was that we panelists admitted that we could have made almost identical points three years ago: (1) the Web (1.0 more than 2.0) is coming soon to mobile devices, but the experience isn’t entirely there yet; and (2) the challenge to extending applications for mobile devices continues to be exacerbated by innovation in device profiles (more on that below). However, the good news is (1) that a “smart phone” profile is converging—a profile that is likely the right target for non-consumer mobile applications; and (2) that “over the air” sync to the native Personal Information Management (PIM) software on mobile devices has gotten dramatically easier/cheaper, and provides exciting new opportunities for mobile application extension.
(more…)
I got myself in a small bit of trouble recently talking about open source IP ownership when I should have been talking about the cool new collaboration and mobile features in the 4.0 release of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. (Nothing like a developer coming by your cube and saying “You said what?”) While I didn’t do such a good job at the time, the underlying point is an important one, so I’m going to give it another shot …
(more…)
One interesting little feature that we have in the 3.2 release is the Zimbra Assistant. This comes up by hitting the “~” tilde key in message or conversation view. This allows you to quickly add a calendar appointment, a contact to your addressbook, send a quick message or interact with a zimlet. The Assistant autocompletes your command. So as you type “ap”, it autocompletes to “appointment” and gives you the agenda for the day so you know how your day looks like before you schedule the appointment (see screenshot below).
(more…)
I have a pet peeve about suggestions that all these exciting Web 2.0 innovations are solely realized within browser-resident Ajax/JavaScript code. For example, consider occasional inquiries regarding a desire to marry Zimbra’s sexy Ajax enduser and administrative UIs with, say, a more mature back-end messaging server. Obviously, one way to respond to such requests is to continue to prove out the Zimbra server’s fault tolerance, scalability, and performance. But I think such requests are more fundamentally misguided.
(more…)
The Zimbra team has just posted the PDF of a benchmarking study that we recently completed with HP. This particular study targets a service provider (Telco, ISP) consumer-facing deployment. (We are also at work on benchmarks for large and medium business profiles that you can expect to see shortly.) The end result was that ZCS delivered consistent and excellent response times while scaling up to 50,000 concurrent/active users and multiple 100,000s of provisioned users per dual-core/dual CPU PC-class server! The Zimbra Community should be thrilled by these results—we are effectively not giving up anything in terms of performance and scale to existing service provider solutions, and we have a dramatically richer feature set to boot.
(more…)
| 
