Zimbra

Some may have heard recently we are putting more emphasis on developing our Zimbra partner channels.  We are fortunate to already have more than 700 partners, including Hosting Service Providers, VARs and SIs who are doing great work; we plan on growing our program globally with more partners and new tools for them (stay tuned, more to come here).

We have kicked off the extended program internally and it’s already beginning to bear fruit.  The Zimbra EMEA team recently attended Red Hat’s EMEA Partner Summit in Malta and was among the honorees for Partner of the Year.  Red Hat and Zimbra have been working more closely together over the last several months; it’s a great value proposition for customers who prefer working closely with one vendor for an integrated application-OS solution.  We’ve had several recent wins together including one of the largest government organizations in the Middle East and in Latin America.

Here is Red Hat’s news summary from the EMEA Partner Summit.   Also below is a snap from the awards evening.  Pictured: Werner Knoblich, VP & GM for Red Hat EMEA; Lars Ronning, GM Zimbra EMEA; Gloria Coviello, Zimbra Director EMEA Sales; Petra Heinrich, Director of Partners & Alliances for Red Hat EMEA.  Wonder who played the trick on us with the logo. 

===

[Update: Please note the original post date of April 1st –we’re just kidding– enjoy! ] 

Zimbra leads the world in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software for Linux and Mac OS X servers. In fact, we recently passed the 40 million paid mailbox milestone. As we have grown, the question often asked is: “When will Zimbra extend its platform support to a given operating system?” Given the success of Zimbra Desktop on Linux, Mac, and Windows - we felt that a server version for Windows as was the next logical choice.

Obviously there are several hurdles going from a Linux environment to Windows, all of the third party applications we rely on need to have freely available cross-platform versions. We’ve partnered with OpenLDAP team, who have stepped up to provide an compatibility patch for a Microsoft Active Directory emulation mode. Combined with a new mail transfer agent written from the ground up, we’re pleased to bring you: Zimbra Collaboration Suite for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

This isn’t the first time we’ve switched a package in favor of our own custom code - in Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 we threw out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch. Replacing Postfix has been the major hurdle for a while now; the engineering team knew that it would be a daunting task.

I already do a lot of my dev work in Eclipse & IntelliJ on Windows. Previously we put PowerShell wrappers around our command line tools to assist more advanced admins. Now we’ve utilized MSI technology to provide the easiest install of a mail server ever. — Anand Palaniswamy, Server Team Lead

This extends Zimbra’s reach of services to the most widely deployed operating systems in the world - theoretically any Windows product; though XP, Vista and 7 will not be officially supported on the Network Edition since they don’t have the same long-term backing by Microsoft development teams. Editions tested by our quality assurance group cover the major versions of Windows Server 2008 including Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, HPC (high-performance computing cluster), Web Server, Small Business, Essential Business, and Foundation Server adaptations; in both x86 & x86_64-bit variants. We hope that the community will step up to cover Itanium based processors.

For the future, the server team is working to integrate Zimbra’s Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with Windows Storage Server, for moving messages and attachments from a primary to a secondary volume based on the age of the message; which lets you to store less frequently accessed data on cheaper disks. Of note, the updates to junctions, reparse points, and symbolic links in recent NTFS versions allows us to do single-instance-storage as well.

We’re playing with .NET access for our SOAP interfaces in the labs. It’s potential is very impressive. — Kevin Henrikson, UI Team Lead

The compatibility with Windows will enable a large, new market for our HSP & VAR partners. To quote Jim Morrisroe, VP of the Zimbra Business Unit here at Yahoo: “It is key to delivering on our strategy and commitment to provide the best experience for users and administrators of any messaging platform in the market today. This launch enables us to sell to 2 million new small businesses and enterprises that view Microsoft server technology as integral to their success.”

ZCS version 5.0.15 for Windows platforms is now available on both the Open Source and Network Edition download pages. The Network Edition will be classified as beta until ZCS 6.0 is released - and will then contain the same product support as well as subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. If you have any questions please contact our Windows sales team.

---

See the ZimbraWindows directory alternative to ZimbraServer in each branch of our public perforce cache for relevant files and build definitions. Try it out - you can leave us feedback thoughts below or over in the Community Forums.

At Zimbra we have been very focused on measuring everything about our products’ adoption, usage and website in order to make improvements for our community and customers. We freely admit to having a burgeoning stats addiction, and though not everyone whoops it up when we barrel through the cubes shouting about the latest Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop download numbers, we think most folks will appreciate this one:

Zimbra paid mailboxes - 41 million and counting.

Crossing the 40 million mark is a big milestone and the credit lies with the growing Zimbra Community (more than 20,000 members strong) and our customers who have helped spread the word.  And our 40M paid mailboxes doesn’t even include Zimbra’s millions of open source users.
We are seeing growth in all of our products: Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Zimbra Hosted and Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and demand for next-gen, open source solutions is strong even in this tough climate.

The primary driver in our rapid mailbox growth is our worldwide partner network. This partner network includes consumer service providers, business hosting providers, VARs and system integrators. Zimbra now has more than 675 Zimbra partners who bring their expertise and focus to the 14 industries, as well as government and education institutions, we serve. Zimbra’s partner network now includes Comcast, Eircom, HP, Frontier, Homestead, Brinkster, Red Hat and more, and these partners and others have expanded the Zimbra customer base to more than 70 countries worldwide.

The graph below shows Zimbra’s paid mailbox growth from when we began sales in 2006 to present.

In addition to strong overall mailbox momentum, we are encouraged by the growth of our customer base outside of North America. Today the majority of our new prospects (68%) are coming from Latin America, Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). It is clear evidence of the power of a global open source community and the impact of new mandates for open source software. Below is a chart of Zimbra paying customers by region; all-in-all more than 60,000 organizations are using Zimbra.

Before heading back to the math grindstone, we want to share one other fun data nuggets: Zimbra Desktop is just shy of two million downloads (we’re estimating we’ll get there in a week). 

Thanks again to all Zimbra Desktop users for your support and feedback – we wouldn’t be where we are today without you; stay tuned for Desktop GA right around the corner!

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
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.

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).

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).

---

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.

---

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.

 

---

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