Zimbra

Admins in the U.S got a chance to talk shop at EDUCAUSE and the LISA ‘08 summit, but what about those in Europe? Don’t despair, because we’re co-hosting a mini-conference with MySQL, SchoolForge, RedHat, Sun, Op5, and Fusis at our UK headquarters in London on November 27th.

While the presentations are specifically aimed at education as well as the non-profit sector, anyone is welcome to attend. Engage us in discussions about your thoughts on the latest technology, how it blends with your school’s ICT strategy, or tackle open source trends for the future. Details on the schedule are over at OpenSourceInSchools.org.uk (of course registration is free, and besides providing the specifics it also gets you a complimentary lunch).

Just a bit on new stuff that’s graced the Zimlet scene lately:

Xythos
Drag and drop your emails (including entire conversations with meta-data or just the attachments) from Zimbra into an Xythos folder of your choosing. Create new emails and link to documents stored on an Xythos content management server for internal accounts - you can even configure expiring tickets to share material with external users.

See it in action here, then contact info@xythos.com if you’d like to try it out.

Dimdim
Join a Dimdim web conference without leaving your inbox; start a meeting right from an email with a single click, drag contacts from your address book, or even drop any appointments in your calendar onto the Zimlet and instantly schedule a Dimdim session.

Dimdim is an awesome open source meeting platform that lets you share your presentations, documents, whiteboards, or desktop (currently Win & Mac with Linux on the roadmap) - and gets you connected via chat, VoIP, or webcam. Run your own server, use their hosted options, or create a free account that lets you connect with up to twenty people at once - attendees don’t even need to be registered.

Grab the Zimet here.

Alfresco
The first content management Zimlet by Starxpert let you save emails, conversations with attachments, or folders onto an Alfresco space.

A newly developed Zimlet from the folks at Alfresco not only helps you save content to ECM server, but also provides the ability to select multiple documents and attach them as links to outgoing emails; several widgets give you ease-of-use in Alfresco space selection and repository navigation. Visit the gallery page to download it.

Get your intent across.
With the new Babelfish Translator & Dictionary Zimlets:



Check them out in the source, they’re coming to your server’s “zimlets-extra” folder shortly - you can even use them in Zimbra Desktop.



 
Auto-Complete & Refined Search

Available in the main branch of perforce are com_zimbra_searchauto & searchrefine. While an updated Yahoo! search Zimlet displays results in a ZmApp tab instead of requiring you to open another browser window.

 

 

 

 

If you’re attending the Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego this week, Steve Hillman (one of our community moderators hailing from Simon Fraser University) is holding a “Birds-of-a-Feather” session on Wednesday, November 12th. Details are here, with more on LISA - from technical workshops to streaming presentation and keynote feeds over here.

For those who didn’t get a chance to join us at EDUCAUSE, some of the panel speakers have posted their presentations; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gave one on the question: Can One Institutional Calendar, Used Creatively, Boost Retention? Which covers their PantherLink system (powered by Zimbra).

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Going to this year’s LISA conference? Drop us a line below if you want to meet-up and discuss all things Zimbra.

EDUCAUSE 08 that is.

We’re big proponents of bringing the latest technology to students and faculty, because countless organizations enjoy using our software in the classroom - as both a communication tool and to teach. So of course we’ll be at this year’s annual EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando, FL from Oct 28th to 31st.

If you’re going, be sure to swing by booth #213 to chat about the future of collaboration, grab a bite to eat with us at Seasons 52 Grill on Wednesday evening (contact us if you’re interested), and drop in for “Feel the Spirit” on Thursday night; which we are co-hosting this year over at Universal Studio’s CityWalk.

If you missed the Xythos webinar yesterday we’ll have the screencast up soon, but you can also play with their awesome new Zimlet in booth #833.

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Be sure to check out the events page for more info, and to see other places we’ll be.

A year an a half ago the (tiny) Yahoo! Calendar team embarked on a mission to build a new Calendar. We were interested in cracking the consumer market where huge potential for growth and innovation lay. The problem was that the 10 year old platform was falling apart and being held together by bungee cord and tape. Innovation on this platform would have been very challenging and forever handicap our efforts going forward.

Zimbra came into the Yahoo! fold and along with it a huge opportunity (large short-term technical challenges as well!) Zimbra’s underlying technology is ripe for customization, and the Yahoo! Calendar Team dove in and came up with some fantastic results.

The all new Yahoo! Calendar Beta is running an a Zimbra back-end which has been embedded into the Yahoo! architecture, with a brand-spanking new front-end composed of JSP enhancements, a new taglib, YUI, and of course AJAX.

 

This is an early beta product where we focused on getting the fundamentals right first. In coming releases expect to see some exciting enhancements. Our Flickr integration is a hint at where we are taking calendaring; its functionality exposes the power of calendars to be a window to discovering interesting events and content, as well as a window to the past.

      

The teams working together from one code repository was an awesome experience, and this cooperation will continue to bring much more innovation across the Yahoo! network. Lots of great calendar code and ideas have come out of this collaboration, look for some in upcoming ZCS releases or check some out in the main branch in perforce.

How can you get on board early? Just visit: switch.calendar.yahoo.com

Checkout some screencasts of the new calendar in action is here, and a video of Scott Dietzen discussing it on All things Digital.

What else are we up to? John Holder is playing host for CalConnect Roundtable XIII this week at one of Yahoo!’s campuses in Santa Carla, CA - we’re collaborating with some big corporations including Sun, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, Kerio, as well as some major university’s to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

 

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Herbert Wang is a Product Manager on the Zimbra-Yahoo! Calendaring Team.

One of the more nifty features to grace the Zimbra scene recently is the interoperability framework for sharing two-way free/busy information with other server platforms.

Since we released the framework APIs and the reference implementation against Microsoft’s Exchange 2003 (previously covered) there has been a lot of interest from customers and community (interop works with both Open Source and Network Edition).

Argonne National Labs has given excellent feedback culminating in a few enhancements for ZCS 5.0.10. We also recently got a wonderful thank you note from the University of Pennsylvania, who teamed up with the folks over at Sumatra Development to handle some calendar migrations. They were impressed at how well their multi-domain environment behaved, and shared a link to a configuration tip for Exchange 2007. It’s great to see the community enhance, extend, and tweak the open source interop framework.

That type of integration cohesiveness frequently makes Zimbra relevant to organizations in the same way that other open source business application are: often initially at the division level, and then spreading within the enterprise. (Penn breaks their IT into “local support providers” to better serve each school’s specialized needs.) For immense corporations wanting to switch from software such as Exchange, Lotus, Meeting Maker, or other third-parties that interact with our API, picking a new platform can be a massive undertaking - having interop can mean a safe departmental decision.

Admins out there can certainly attest the the headaches involved with maintaining different server infrastructures, but it also works in reverse - that ’stubborn group’ which doesn’t want to switch or the ‘peer organization running different software’ can now seamlessly communicate as one.

Someone in the forums recently asked about ways to migrate individual accounts from one ZCS instance to another, so thought I’d share the enlightenment with all. Whether you are going from an on-premise install to a hosting provider, want to create handy archives of old employee accounts, or just need to duplicate mailbox contents of a user; the syntax in this article proves remarkably useful, and applies to all editions.

There are a multitude of comparable RFE’s on addressing this need via different approaches. (Bugzilla entries 19630, 29573, 28443 & 30163 to name a few.) Some want graphical tools to browse data and selectively migrate certain things, while others would be happy with a cross LDAP zmmailboxmove.

Depending on your situation, several backup tools can take care of a large portion of your daily needs; and there are ways to do Zimbra-to-Zimbra migrations using the Network Edition’s backup and restore capabilities - however they require admin abilities on both systems. Meanwhile, most of the frequently used open source backup solutions are simply an “all accounts at-once” approach. So what to do when you need to move from your personal setup to a hosting provider? Or if you’re a hosting provider, move a tiny handful of accounts to a separate infrastructure? Before diving into the wiki on user migration for info on Imapsync, REST exports, CURL imports, etc; there’s a handy way to avoid the “one item type at-a-time” transfer methods.

In ZCS 5.0.9+ you can export an entire mailbox with:
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com getRestURL “//?fmt=tgz” > /tmp/account.tgz

Next transfer via rsync, scp, sftp, etc. You’ll also need to create the account on the 2nd server if the desired account doesn’t exist at your destination server yet.

Then import with:
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com postRestURL “//?fmt=tgz&resolve=reset” /tmp/account.tgz

The resolve= paramater has several options:

• “skip” ignores duplicates of old items, it’s also the default conflict-resolution.
• “modify” changes old items.
• “reset” will delete the old subfolder (or entire mailbox if /).
• “replace” will delete and re-enter them.

‘Reset’ will be a bit faster on an empty destination mailbox because it skips most dupe checks.

Note: There were some duplication fixes and additional issues (mainly sync related) corrected with the tar formatter in 5.0.10.

Not a Zimbra Admin? Users can get the same zip/tar formatter on REST URL’s by visiting:
http:// server.domain.com/home/user?fmt=zip&query=is:anywhere

The zip format has been around for a long time, but doesn’t contain account & item metadata like the tar formatter automatically does:
http:// server.domain.com/home/user/?fmt=tgz

Infact, this same technique is currently used in Zimbra Desktop’s alpha backup solution.

If this approach doesn’t scale performance wise for your situation, or you simply don’t want to have everyone hit a REST URL for 30GB mailboxes all at the same time, here’s a collection of helpful scripts and other ways to systematically migrate:

Mysqldump & rsync with an interesting blob management technique: Zimbra2Zimbra

Imapsync for mail + postRestURL for contacts, calendar & filters: ZimbraMigrate (Expand the concept for tasks, documents, and briefcase items.)

Another method that could be extrapolated upon for migrations: Per User Mailbox Backup (OE Version - Zimbra :: Wiki)

Most of these solutions aren’t going to respect share permissions, but when pulling an account out of an environment that’s to be expected.

Zimlet spin-offs:
- Mail backup options for end users (.eml)
- Zimlet to save email in a txt file (.txt or html)

The above Zimlets are aimed at making quick self-copies & not for restores, but there are many methods for putting messages back into Zimbra, including tools like zmmailbox addMessge, zmlmtpinject, CURL, etc; for more info checkout these threads: Recover data from store folders & Moving Folders between users

If moving your entire server, I’m a huge fan of the install.sh -s trick when using NE backups to do so isn’t an option.

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Have another method you’d like to share? Document it in the wiki & note it below, or you can discuss over in the Community Forums.

In 2003, we founded Zimbra because we thought that existing e-mail and calendaring solutions were broken and we knew we could create something much better – that something is the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), an Ajax-based collaboration client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, instant message, documents with sharing capabilities, advanced search and VoIP into a browser-based interface. We owe the thousands of members of the Zimbra community many thanks for their ongoing contributions – together, we’ve achieved great things!

We’ve given customers “new and improved” mailboxes and we’ve focused on creating the best possible experience for collaboration – streamlining overflowing inboxes, organizing correspondence, and reducing the hassles of managing communication tools on the back-end.

A year ago, we joined the Yahoo! family to extend Zimbra’s reach, share our expertise to one of the top mail services in the world – Yahoo! Mail – and to continue to change the face of how users collaborate at school, work, and home. Yahoo! has given us the resources, including greater computing power, to continue to expand and update ZCS with new features, and support an ever-growing customer base.

We’re proud of our accomplishments over the past year. On the customer front, we welcomed a number of world-class organizations. Stanford, UMass (Dartmouth), UPenn, CalPoly, and Texas A&M are among the institutions that drove well over a million mailboxes sold in the education market this year, driving record growth across all the markets we serve. There are now over 15 million Zimbra mailboxes deployed, serving over 50,000 customers in 82 countries, expanding our world-class reach. That reach has been further expanded through partnerships with Red Hat, Apple, and Ubuntu.

This past year also reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation as demonstrated by the stream of enhancements to the Zimbra product family:

• The launch of ZCS 5.0 extended BlackBerry and Outlook 2007 support plus Web 2.0 IM and task applications;
• Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop – currently in beta – provides users with offline access to a simple, centralized place to manage work, school and personal e-mail without an Internet connection;
• Extensive mobile options give our users anytime, anywhere access to ZCS and extend Zimbra to the broadest range of devices available in the market. Mobile options now include iPhone 2.0, smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, Treo, etc.) and any Java-enabled mobile device (Nokia E & N Series, Motorola RAZR, ROKR etc.). These build on Yahoo!’s leadership in e-mail and mobile Web services as a key starting point for consumers.

We’ve got tons more in the pipeline. Later this year, we’ll be debuting new products that continue to make collaboration a superior experience, such as the general availability for Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and exciting cloud services for universities and businesses. Look out for more developments with the Open Mail initiative that debuted at Yahoo! Hack Day last week, along with other cool synergies with Yahoo! Mail and Calendar.

- Thanks Again! The Zimbra Team

Zimbra is presenting a session on Zimlets at Yahoo’s Open Hack 2008. The session starts at Noon PDT, and we’ll be live blogging here. Stay tuned. Hack Day Blog - Hack Day Twitter - OpenHack Zimlet Wiki

HackDay just kicked off, and we’ve seen all sorts of things go from idea to prototype in just 24 hours. This year has a twist: Not only are our engineers across the globe involved (with many making it an all-nighter) but everyone is invited to participate - even you. Open Hack 2008 takes place September 12-13th where anyone with an idea is encouraged to gather a team up, then spend a day building stuff that they think is cool. HackU (the University Hackdown) is even flying in its top ranks, with a few Zimbra customers among them (including Stanford & Georgia Tech) to join us at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, CA for rounds of coding; plus camaraderie, food, demos, awards, and good music. From our team KevinH & JohnH are also giving several presentations throughout the event.

Some of the things we’re ran across have given us ideas for Zimlets - so we’re hereby seeking Zimlet beta testers. This will be an ongoing project, meaning that those who volunteer will get continuous access to the latest and greatest Zimlet ideas.

We need volunteers that:

• Are using either ZCS (with the ability to deploy Zimlets - so essentially administrators of the respective system) or Zimbra Desktop users.

• Are willing to try out different services that some of these may link to, and consciously note how they affect their daily Zimbra experience.
• Of course give us feedback about their place in productivity, effectiveness, usefulness, and anything you’d like to see added or extended.

To join in just send me a PM/Email by the end of this week. (We’ll be sure to reward you for your efforts.)

We can’t take everyone, so if you not accepted don’t feel bad - there’s still plenty of cool & useful Zimlets over in the Gallery - plus they’ll soon be making it off engineer workstations and into perforce. We’re even working on a way to make them easier to install in Zimbra Desktop, but you can find current directions here.

Those on the development side will soon see a few community members marked “Zimlet Guru” - if you’ve created a few yourself, and are into helping out others in the Zimlet section of the forums, be sure to drop me a line.