Version 5.0.12 of our collaboration suite is now available for download!
Some enhancements of note for admins:
- 33358 – Postfix policy on validating RCPT TO content for minimizing backscatter spam for alias domains. (postfix_enable_smtpd_policyd)
- 33720 – By mapping alias to real domains we can allow auth with alias domain addresses and send out-of-office notifications for alias domains. (zimbraDomainAliasTargetId)
For users:
- 34751 – Avoid unnecessary appointment blob access for calendar summary viewing to produce faster cal tab loading.
- 6082 – Notification for delegate stores/shared folders.
Pushing change notifications to the UI eliminates the need for manual refreshes. An excellent thing as we approach simultaneous editing of the same document.
Zimbra Desktop meanwhile will be leaving beta 5 for the release candidate stage later this month. With a new early-adopters upgrade program as well; I know many of you testers are excited for a faster release pace.
We had a Mac oriented year-in-review, but some have asked “what about those of use who aren’t apple fanboys?” So as the holidays become a distant memory of nothing more than food, friends, and family; thought we’d take a 2nd moment to look back at community contributions and other happenings of 2008.
What seems like only a little while ago, we posted on our 10,000th forum member, and just two months thereafter we hit 11,000. We promise not to post stats every few thousand registrations, but these are just so staggering:
- Sept 2005: We started the forums.
- Nov 2006: 5k Members
- Sept 2007: 10K Members
- Nov 2007: 11K Members
- Dec 2008: 20K Members
In simple math, that’s almost double (x1.7) our growth rate over the past year. In that same time period the amount of posts and threads have also skyrocketed.
The fact that so many active members stick around to contribute and help their brethren on topics ranging from administration to development plus everything in-between, continues to amaze, impress, and makes us proud. Zimbra is clearly about something more – giving back, enhancing, and shaping the future of communication.
Seems more of you need to subscribe to the blog though (visits vs subscriptions) but I digress – hint: There’s a box on the right ;)
As our organization turns five, and our community three we just wanted to echo one more giant thank you. Your feedback and ideas are what keeps us pushing the limits of collaboration. We couldn’t do it without you.
Often hitting over 600 new registrations a month, and pushing close to 120,000 posts – the forums are so busy we thought we’d give you a little update, just in-case you haven’t had the opportunity to take it all in!
Here’s a bit of the highlights from the past year:
Going Mobile
Some excellent contributors have stepped up to make Open Source mobile synchronization for contacts, calendaring, and tasks a reality.
It’s may seem like a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart, but you can checkout the Funambol thread or find more info here. (Special thanks to Hillman, Wolfroma & Costa-101)
Want just open source push mail? You can find directions over in this wiki.
We’ve made our Java based ZimbraME client open source. Get the code from our public perforce cache, then modify & combile it for your needs. It will build and run on just about any phone that runs J2ME. You can also download one of our pre-compiled releases – including one for BlackBerry devices.
Too daring for your taste? The two mobile web-client cousins (main & mainx) are also available in complete open source and work in just about every browser. They provide excellent JSP tag lib examples for making your own portals or quick optimized client – they have all sorts of uses. (We promise more info on creating these home tab portals is coming shortly.)
Community Builds
We’ve added an amazing team of OpenSource Buildmasters that put out community builds for Ubuntu 8 32/64-bit (now an official release), Solaris 9 & 10, Mac OS X 10.4 PPC, OpenSUSE, and even FreeBSD – yes you didn’t misread that list.
(
Dijichi2,
Osmedts, and many more have done an excellent job!)
Mail-Clients
There’s always those that love their favorite thick-client so much we’d have to pry it from their cold dead hands. For Thunderbird fans
Zindus has taken ZCS<>Thunderbird sync for personal AND shared contacts to a whole new level. (Thank you
lmj!)
Zimbra Desktop builds have been packed with new content that you’re just going to have to read all the blog entries on Beta 5, Beta 4 & Beta 3. It’s not just about ZCS Sync anymore, ZD is here to help you connect with multiple major providers. We’re in the process of joining multiple repositories to bring it to the masses easier. Plus it’s a perfect testbed for quickly developing new themes or Zimlets without installing an entire test server. There’s even a community developed Solaris port by SivaSSKumar available here.
Tools, Extensions, & Zimlets
- Pbruna built ZimbraNotify, a Linux Toaster equivalent.
- Samba & Posix extensions now come pre-bundled.
- Deugenin developed an extension for global email footers!
Zimlets Galore: From the self backup ideas of StarXpert & Fbackup, to user-managed resource & location control from the ZWC, plus a whole slew of excellent collaboration tools – you can find a whole lot more Zimlets in the gallery. (And “Zimlet Month” is coming up fast.)
Other Cool Stuff
The new DnD Zimlet & FF extension allows you to to simply drag attachments from your desktop into you web-client’s mail compose window or briefcase. We plan to make this cross-browser/multi-platform using Yahoo’s BrowserPlus in the future, and in ZCS 6.0 we can alert you to new mail on your desktop – or even read your mails back to you out loud.
We’ve honed our CalDAV & free-busy interop calendaring with participation in multiple CalConnect roundtables.
The developer section of the forums is abound with stuff from an AJAX ticker on the login page, to perl access modules, and not one but two a interesting methods for individual and global read receipts.
Integrate Zimbra into your favorite browser in the form of mail/appointment notices, a toolbar, or make your daily ZCS interactions more useful with things like FF3’s new protocol handlers. Plus WebDav has so many uses that people are only starting to discover.
There’s also 1, 2, 3 reasons you have no excuse to not be backing up – more here, and we made it so simple that even users can do it. And some recent HA ideas if you’re not one for DRBD or some other favorites.
Forum Enhancements
The forum got a theme revamp, portable edition, and revised layouts.
Some new areas include:
* Specific product sections like Zimbra Desktop, Connector for Blackberry, and the J2ME phone client.
* A section dubbed ‘Camp Zimbra‘ for those who’ve completed official training and become ‘Alumni’. 
* Zimbra in Education gives our EDU professionals a opportunity to unite.
* An /etc lounge for general conversation.
There’s now one click access to Wiki Sandboxes – make yourself a reference guide or use it to troubleshoot.
And last but not least, we’ve increased the size of our awesome crew of volunteer moderators and regulars who give up their time to answer your admin and developer related questions everyday.
Thanks to all who visit the forums for making our community first rate!
If you haven’t kept up with Zimbra upgrades in a while we’re currently about to release ZCS 5.0.12 with more features than we could mention in a blog post – you can find a quick list via the product management portal. And we promise a few ZCS 6.0 teasers soon.
If you didn’t get the opportunity to visit us in Orlando for the 2008 Educause conference, the 2009 Southwest regional is already coming up on February 24th through 26th.
This year’s annual gathering will focus on cyberinfrastructure and e-scholarship, managing the enterprise, as well as the evolving role of IT and leadership in learning. The symposium is being held at the Marriott Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. We won’t have a typical booth, but drop us a line if you want to meet-up and discuss anything Zimbra. Thanks to all who dropped by during last weeks Mid-Atlantic conference!
If your going, or need an excuse to go; on Wednesday evening we’re hosting dinner/cocktails from 6 – 8 pm for our current customers, plus any of you who may still be on the fence and want to chat further or swap insights.
Restaurant Info:
-
Boudro’s (~.5 miles from the events) located at 421 East Commerce Street.
-Space is limited, so be sure to
contact us for availability if you’re interested.
More info on sessions, seminars,
speakers, and presentations:
program site &
full conference agenda.
Can’t make it? Of course we’ll be at the Mid-west (Chicago) and Western (San Francisco) Educause colloquium’s in March and April, as well as the the big one in November (Denver).
Check out the events page to see other places we’ll be.
Every year, the Macworld Expo brings together a loyal and diverse base of Mac users which also happens to make up a core set of Zimbra’s customers. Once again this year you’ll find us at the show. We’re setting up house with 01.com (one of our many partners) at booth 4328 – we hope you can stop by and find out how Zimbra works seamlessly with Apple products at home or on the go. And if you can’t make it, take a look at our 2008 recap of Mac-related news, or visit http://www.zimbra.com/apple/ for more information.
December
Inquisitor, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in the Web browser, was acquired by Yahoo! and launched for Safari 3 in May, and then for Firefox 2 and 3, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in October. Last month, in the Desktop Beta 5 release, we launched built-in Inquisitor support for the search bar – bringing Zimbra users access to Inquisitor’s fast, smart and flexible search experience.
October
In October, Zimbra and Yahoo! hosted the CalConnect Roundtable, a symposium on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies, including iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV(3) standards. The meeting allowed us to collaborate with some big corporations including Apple, Google, Kerio, Microsoft and Sun, as well as some major universities to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.
July
We love poker at Zimbra so with July we get to watch the world series and we get to play at our very own poker tables. By mid-summer, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone arrived – bringing over-the-air synchronization to the native email, address book and calendar apps on any iPhone with 2.0 software and ZCS Network Edition with Zimbra Mobile enabled – just in time for loading up on the new iPhone 3G.
June
We’re always trying to find new ways to make the user experience faster, and this summer we put all the latest Web browsers to the test. We found Safari 3.3.1 to be the winner of the browser wars – an ideal companion to the Zimbra Web Client for the fastest collaboration experience yet.
February
In February, we launched a great improvement to Zimbra Collaboration Suite with our 5.0 release. In Zimbra’s traditionally inclusive style, we launched with support for Mac OS and for any mobile web browser, including the Apple iPhone. ZCS 5.0 also included the beta release of Zimbra Desktop, which gave all PC, Mac, and Linux machines the same rich Zimbra experience online and offline.
January
At MacWorld last year, we gave our Apple customers more to cheer about as we embraced support for Apple products and technologies, including Safari 3 and CalDAV for Mac OS X Leopard.
We look forward to 2009 and all the really cool stuff we are going to (very soon) launch.
