Zimbra supports shared calendars, documents, and address books. . .but there was one thing missing: Shared Mail Folders. With 116 votes, this enhancement is number 9396 (but really started with bug 6561), and has been around since ZCS 3.0. This has been one of the most requested features to ever hit our bugzilla.
Shared folders was a difficult one for us. There were a lot of server-side things that had to change. For example, this one feature depended on bugs 6082, 7527, 13101, 15634, 15637, 15773, and 7083. This means we had to resolve all of those issues/features before we could roll out Shared Folders.
Well it’s just about finished, and now we’d like to give you a quick tour of Shared Folders in Zimbra 5.0 (click on the images for large size).
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It all starts with this. A folder that I need to share with someone. In the folder, I have an RSS Feed. If you haven’t tried Zimbra’s RSS Feed reader, you should. |
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A right click on the folder brings up a contextual menu. We click "Share Folder". |
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Once we choose "Share Folder", we are presented with the Share folder dialog. We can then use our autocomplete to share it with someone else. In this case, I’m sharing to Kevin Henrikson. |
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The user receives a notification that the Folder has been shared, and once accepted, it appears in the list of folders. |
We welcome your feedback@zimbra.com or post a note in our forums.
on August 27th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
My company and I have been looking into changing over to Zimbra from an ISP/POP with Outlook 2003 setup. One of the features we we’re hoping to see is sharing of email messages in some way. This looks great. The one thing we thought would be better or just as great is the ability to share all messages with a certain tag. For example a sales rep tags all emails from a certain customer; say ABC Co.; and then he/she could set all messages tagged ABC Co. as shared with a Customer Service Rep. Just a different way to look at sharing, but this looks great! How long till 5.0 GA??
on August 27th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Hi Jake-
Glad you like it!
We hope to have ZCS 5.0 GA in October. Today, we released Beta 3. I encourage you to download and try it!
john
on August 28th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I think that Shared Folder can (and SHOULD) be used as a kind of “reverse email groups”. Put another way - create a group; make this group a special type of group, a “shared group”; associate a bunch of users with the group; now all email sent to the group will be put into a shared folder with the name of the group (instead of copied to each mailbox). This would be much more intuitive - no need to setup special filtering or routing, the shared group is exactly what is needed. This (together with RSS!) is a killer feature.
on August 29th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Looks great Guys!
Well done for listening to your users, many companies don’t!
(:
on October 6th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
thanks, we wanted this.
greetings from Belgium,
Lars.
on December 13th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I think I do not quite understand the difference in functionality between a shared folder and an IMAP folder accessed by more than one user. Could you elaborate? Thank you.