Zimbra’s massive user base means our new product releases reach farther than ever before. How far? Consider our 50 million paid mailbox count. With that comes the responsibility to make our solutions exactly what people need when it comes to shaping the future of communication.
So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?
Sync your phone like never before.
We’ve added user trigger-able device wipe, server policies, and tasks to the existing MobileSync support for email, contacts, and appointments.
Arrange and personalize the interface.
Read and compose multiple messages in tabs without the need for pop-out windows using the advanced AJAX client. Widescreen? Move the reading pane to the side.
Presentation Framework.
Create new presentations (as well as documents and spreadsheets) from the briefcase – no need for external software to run them.
Calendar views. Direct CalDav connections. Streamlined contacts.
Our feature rich UI has new layouts including fisyeye and a sortable list view. Access an external ICS/CalDAV url – with adjustable automatic update polling frequencies. For the address book: Rather than pages of blanks to fill out, add only the contact fields you want.
Lite-client overhauls galore.
The standard HTML client now includes all our primary apps, plus the ability to drag items like it’s AJAX cousin. Using a web-browser on your mobile device? There’s multiple variants based on device type and connection speed. We’ve added appointment management functionality to the portable web-client, a simplified login page, as well as file access.
Role based administration.
Delegate. Empower distribution list managers without worrying about them accidentially changing major server settings. Even let someone add or remove members, but not create or delete existing lists – the views and ACL rights are that customizable. Hosting providers can now give one account permission to manage multiple domains or adjust class-of-service features.
Connect with your social world.
Zimlets now have the ability to define application or preferences tabs. So use the new Social Zimlet to manage Twitter, Facebook, or just browse Digg. Try the Discover Zimlet to visit all that Del.icio.us has to offer.
Share Management.
Join a new group? Get up to speed fast – receive and an instant email about all the available shares. Didn’t accept that invite long ago but turns out you need something? Rather than digging it up, just use the new share tool to see what you have permissions on; or have given to others.
Server Architecture Improvements.
A few of the powerful under-the-hood changes include a new OpenLDAP engine with the ability to make on the fly config tweaks, SQLite & RRD for logger, customizable hierarchical storage queries. Plus we’ve exposed a UI for the stats service – giving you quick insight on just about everything you can think of.
Someone on the Zimbra freenode channel recently asked: “Why skip the usual numbering scheme?” Well, we felt the above along with several hundred other groundbreaking enhancements made it worthy of a major revision number instead of a more modest 5.5 designation. Be sure to checkout read receipts, browseable company directories (global address list sync folders), on-behalf sending options, print size controls, published (self-enabled) Zimlet settings, fast on-demand/header-first sync in the Outlook connector, and the ability to run filters over existing items.
We’ll have to stop listing improvements there, but the great strides of Zimbra’s growth trajectory can ultimately be traced back to the power of our partner model and community ecosystem. While we don’t reflect Open Source Edition users in our metrics, everyone here certainly recognizes their role in making the Zimbra Server what it is today. So no matter which edition you use, our engineering team invites you to leave us some feedback on version 6.0.1 over in the forums. What features do you want to see implemented next? Let us know below, or test the nightly builds for a glimpse of aspects like pressure based page scrolling, support for the CardDav standard, and the ability to remove attachments but retain an email body; all of which are just a heartbeat away.
Try it now: Experience collaborative messaging and groupware done right – play with some of the above using a sample account on our live hosted demo.
Download ZCS: Grab the open source edition, it’s completely free to use and even modify code to your delight; or get the network version packed with extras.
 With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.
ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.
But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.
We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.
Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs. “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.
Get the latest version of the Social Zimlet from the Gallery
Thanks again for all your support and feedback; hope you enjoy ZCS 6.0!
Network Edition server download | Open Source Edition server download
You can also find a bit more about what’s new in ZCS 6 on the Zimbra website.
In part three of this series, we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bruce has been an esteemed advocate for Zimbra since the campus switched over to our offerings two years ago. If you recall, we highlighted some of UWM’s creations in our original post, including their White Pages, Availability, Help Tool, and Subscription Center Zimlets. We recently caught up with them to get the low down on Zimbra happenings across campus.
 Read more from our Q&A with Bruce below:
How many people are using Zimbra on campus?
Approximately 50,000 users since last summer. Practically every department had a different setup. We recently had our fourth Microsoft Exchange migration, this time with University Police, and they are already productively utilizing Zimbra as their email and calendaring tool. We also had three Groupwise environments migrate, and they had very few issues after conversion.
What’s your favorite thing about Zimbra?
Given the state of the economy and our budget, the favorite thing for me is that I am able to deploy services for mail and calendar for 50k accounts with under three full time employees total, all staffing included. The system administrators who formally supported distributed Exchange and Groupwise environments have now been able to focus on higher value added services for our faculty.
 What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve gotten since deployment?
That’s easy. The calendar has been a strong focus since the start, and our end-users really appreciate that we now have a fully enterprise calendar linking faculty, staff, and students in one integrated environment. We have connected the calendar with our other sources, such as our course management tool, student system, and tutoring/mentoring scheduler; everyone has responded very favorably to each new feature.
Have any institutional issues been solved or mitigated since introducing Zimlets?
We have a big test ahead of us this fall with the debut of our Subscription Center Zimlet. We expect it to have a positive impact on student retention through the ability to better organize all aspects of the lives of new students from the first day they show up on campus. I can’t wait to see the results.
You can get further insight about UWM’s deployment here. Need help with your own concept – or have an design idea for extending Zimbra? Let us know over in the forums.
In our first post of the series, we highlighted a few of the recent creations coming out of Wayne State University – their Broadcast, AccessID, and Anti-Phishing Zimlets. Given the unique customization abilities, there are many reasons and motives behind every Zimlet’s conception. So, we decided to check in with Systems Analyst Rob Thompson, to provide some context behind their latest extensions.
 Highlights from our Q&A with Rob are below:
How long have you been running Zimbra?
The university started evaluating mail systems in earnest during the 1st quarter of 2008. We went full production for all of our 70,000 users in June 2009.
What’s your favorite Zimlet and why?
One of the most popular is our AccessID Zimlet. Our previous email system did not have an extensible API that would allow us to integrate our directory information into email content. Zimbra’s ability to create context-sensitive events allows our users to mouse-over an internal WSU ID number (which are quite cryptic) and instantly retrieve a name, department, phone, email address, and other data from our directory about the referenced user.
Were there any campus issues in particular that inspired you to leverage mashups?
Integration with student content applications and existing frameworks are where we are seeing the most demand, and thus where we are focusing our development. This includes L-Soft Listserv, a home-grown announcement service, class schedule information and more. Since going live, we have had a steady stream of requests to leverage external systems into the Zimbra user interface. Many of these projects are already well underway.
What are students and/or faculty saying about your Zimlets?
Since we’re very early on in our rollout, every compliment seems to come with another request for more integration work! In the past we have had to turn these requests down, as they were simply not possible with the software at hand. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us, and are very excited to have the opportunity to accomplish them with Zimbra.
 
Stay tuned for part three. To answer some common questions from our first entry: A few of the Zimlets mentioned aren’t available in the gallery, since they are written in a way that interacts with specific back-end systems at each institution. Where possible the authors are working to separate usable code for the broader benefit of all. In the meantime, you can get help with connectors like these and your own ideas over in the community forums.
Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.
Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program. A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community. This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform. This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members. A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed. The position will be responsible for developer events, training, documentation and ensuring that developers have all they need to make use of the rich APIs Zimbra offers.
- Our forum with over 27,000 members http://www.zimbra.com/forums/
- Our company/developer blog http://www.zimbrablog.com/
- Our developer and admin wiki http://wiki.zimbra.com/
- Our public bug database http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/
- Our public community driven roadmap http://pm.zimbra.com/
- Our web mash-up extensions (zimlet) gallery http://gallery.zimbra.com/
You can apply directly on the job posting here:
http://careers.yahoo.com/jdescription.php?oid=24060
If you have more questions of have someone in mind who you think would be a good fit please feel free to email me.
KevinH at Zimbra.com
-kevin
 It’s September, which signals the time students will be returning to school. At Zimbra, this means continuing our work with the more than 500 institutions that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. We are thrilled to help educators and students alike with their communication needs in over 33 countries, including institutions such as Kansas State, Texas A & M, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.
With “back-to-school” in the air, we thought it was an appropriate time to check in on some of our education customers. Turns out, Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, compatibility with other email clients and campus systems, open technologies, easy branding, administrator-friendly architecture, in both hosted and on-premise deployment options aren’t the only reasons why Zimbra continues to be the #1 choice for education. Today, schools are growing contributors to our highly regarded Zimlet program. With customized mash-ups, more and more educational institutions at all levels are taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source roots and community, by easily integrating ZCS with other online tools that students and faculty interact with daily.
A few universities have recently shared with us some examples of useful implementations:
Wayne State University
Message Authenticity Zimlet: Helps the student confirm the authenticity of a message sent by Wayne administration. Users may choose alternative delivery methods and rate the message’s importance relevance to them in order to provide feedback for future news updates.
AccessID Zimlet: This hover-over Zimlet provides users with a quick look into the university directory, making sense of arcane user ID codes.
Anti-Phishing Zimlet: Beyond just marking something as spam, this Zimlet allows users to report an email as a serious phishing attempt into an automatic tickiting system, so that Wayne administrators can research if other users have inadvertently provided personal information when they shouldn’t, and then report back to the campus about any complaint to be aware of.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Subscription Center Zimlet: This Zimlet acts as the single source for consolidated public calendar information enabling users to search, browse, and subscribe to assorted campus and community calendars.
White Pages Zimlet: This Zimlet integrates an existing directory server to provide various phone number, office location, and home address information of students, faculty, and staff, based on their existing privacy settings.
Help Zimlet: Gives users quick access to custom tailored documentation for the campus community as well as video screencasts demonstrating how to use and configure various features of the Zimbra web interface.
Simon Fraser University
Course Resources/mySFU Zimlet: Content put out by professors for a specific class, and also connects to details on course books, library records, campus news, and more.
Tips & Tricks Zimlet: A customized interface with a daily tidbit of useful info for getting the most out of the Zimbra experience as well as computing accross campus.
Broadcast Alert Zimlet: Gets the word out to anyone with Zimbra currently open or upon next login. With students on the system so often to get work done, it’s a great way to send a critical notice.
Stay tuned and we will continue the series with additional screenshots plus more in depth Q&A with a few Zimbra educational customers.
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