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).

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s truly amazing how excited people get over Zimbra - so thought we’d share some of the ways people show it.

We were pleasantly surprised a few days ago when a school declared a ‘national Zimbra day’ and sent us pictures of cupcakes (that we can virtually enjoy). Why the baked goods? They recently rolled out ZCS and love it. Since we are also launching 5.0.9 today it’s fitting.

As the summer is the perfect time for schools to do system upgrades when students aren’t around, Thunder04’s organization had a conversion party while they worked on their switchover - with some delicious goodies of course.


The Menlo Park City School District (which serves Menlo Park & Atherton in California) would like to wish you all a “Happy Zimbra Conversion or Upgrade Day” as ZCS 5.0.9 has just been released! (This version includes additional beta builds for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in both x86 & 64-bit as well.)

 

One of the largest areas of growth for Zimbra has been the educational sector. Perhaps it’s the simple calendar and mail sharing…or maybe it’s the built-in instant messaging. Since the beginning, Zimbra has been a perfect fit for thousands of Educational Institutions around the world.

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At Zimbra, we have many great customers in a wide range of industries, from financial services (H&R Block), to healthcare (Huntsville Hospital), to manufacturing (Middleville Tool and Die). Recently we have begun picking up steam in the education market, and we have been lucky to have over 300 educational institutions around the globe as customers.

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We’re continuing our Webinar Higher Ed Series with “Deploying Zimbra on Campus- A Case Study of Best Practices and Lessons Learned”. I’m told that all of the slots are filling up fast, so you should register today to insure you’ve got a spot. It will be moderated by Matt Asay, noted open source strategist and CNET blogger and VP of Business Development for Alfresco. We also have several guest speakers.

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We invite you to join our webinar tomorrow(Oct 16), “Unicon Higher-Ed Round 2″. As someone who worked in Education for six years as an IT Director, I know that costs vs features are typically the first thing educational institutions look at. So how can Zimbra help you?

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