Zimbra

We held the first hands-on Zimlet training over at our London offices back in October, where Raja Rao put together such a great presentation and collection of modules that we decided to roll it into a permanent series.

If your organization is interested in enhancing Zimbra via communication with external services, adding extra functionality via widgets and application portals, or just wants to increase usability of existing inline content: We cordially invite you to our beautiful (and relatively warm) Sunnyvale, California campus February 23-24th. Whether your somewhat new to basic object oriented JavaScript programming or already familiar with advanced Zimbra specific SOAP, JSON requests, and hooks; our front-end engineers and best mashup gurus will be available to help get your coding started.

Details on this two day course’s agenda and the registration form can be found here: Zimbra-Training-Registration-Zimlet-Course.pdf

-For more information contact us or email training@
-Local Hotel options: Zimbra-Training-Location-Sunnyvale.pdf
-There are partner discounts, though any member of the community is welcome to attend even if you aren’t a network edition customer.
-Can’t make it in December? We’re holding another in May tentatively the 4th through 5th. Be sure to let us know early if your interested – space is limited and will fill up fast.

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Find out about other sessions (for admins, helpdesk staff, and even end users) over on the training site.

One of the best parts of being open source is seeing the ingenuity of our community. This year we’d like to see how you can use Zimbra themes to make your skin crawl this Halloween…

We’ve mocked up two new designs just in time for witching hour, and hope to get these into the gallery soon, but we’d also like to inspire you to put your Zimbra in a costume!

 
Do you prefer the fun of creepy pumkins, spiders, witches, bats, and black cats? Or is the dark brooding theme with a graveyard and crows more spooky? Vote for your favorite here. The Halloween skin with the most votes will be added to our permanent collection by one of our engineers.

 

Rick found an frightening skull that fit the folder tree well, and he’s already coded it into a downloadable theme – to quote one person’s take: “I couldn’t use it for very long without the hairs on the back of my neck tingling, that face is scary.”

 
Don’t forget, there are plenty of other skins that let your Zimbra play dress up all year long… Halloween isn’t the only time of year when it’s ok to pretend to be someone else!

Are you more of a race car driver, a pretty princess, or work in ACU’s and just can’t get enough digital cammo in your email?

Make your Zimbra reflect your mood or keep things interesting with the skin changer Zimlet, which switches themes automatically using whatever frequency preference you set. For even more variety, why not design your own custom theme!

Tell us what other seasonal themes you’d like to see next, even if their half a year away. Prefer a more traditional fall scheme of changing leaves and landscapes? Checkout what others are doing over in the fourms.

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 3^rd 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 25^th 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.

During the past 5 years, Zimbra has evolved from a software company selling nearly 100% direct to customers to a model today where well over half of our sales are generated through Zimbra partners.

The channel-focused evolution has been intentional; early on we realized working via Zimbra resellers, hosting partners and systems integrators is the best way Zimbra can satisfy our rapidly growing customer base’s wide-ranging requirements while continuing to grow efficiently.  With this model we’ve been able to increase the number of paid Zimbra customers to over 60,000 organizations, accounting for over 41 million paid mailboxes – the second largest number of paid mailboxes for any email/collaboration product in the U.S.

We certainly couldn’t help deploy or support this number of customers without the involvement of so many valuable Zimbra partners!

Our sales team certainly appreciates the leverage they gain by working hand-in-hand with channel partners.  Given that, we believe finding new ways to work even more closely together will enhance our mutual success and take us to the next level.

Today we’re pleased to take that next step forward by announcing a new Zimbra Partner Program, featuring:

• A new ‘Gold’ tier for our most advanced Zimbra partners
• An updated Partner Portal with new and updated documentation, sales tools and marketing resources
• Improved visibility for our top partners on the Zimbra website
• New opportunities for deal registration
• More Zimbra resources for co-marketing and selling

Please visit our partner website pages for further details (you may also contact or email our channels team).

In the meantime we’ve also been busy launching more than a dozen distribution relationships around the world to provide enhanced services to our network of VARs in the new Zimbra Partner Program.  These new Zimbra distributors include:

• United States: SYNNEX Corporation, as part of the Open Source Channel Alliance, co-sponsored by RedHat
• Europe:  Several distributors including COMMEO and D2B (France), Interactive Ideas (UK), VNC (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), VDEL (Russia and Eastern Europe), and Nordicmind (Scandanavia).
• Middle East & North Africa: Opennet MEA
• South Africa & Sub-Saharan Africa: Linux Warehouse
• Latin America: Red Hat
• Japan: We’re continuing our strong relationship with Sumitomo.

Some of the key VAR benefits from distributors include streamlined process for placing and fulfilling orders, dedicated account managers and communication channels for rapid support, and access to new payment and financing options.  Our sales team will continue to work directly with our VAR partners (and as often as needed, with the end customers).

We believe the new program is right in line with Zimbra’s objectives for 2009 and beyond: continue growing our customer base and revenues, raise customer satisfaction even higher, firmly establish Zimbra as the leading open collaboration platform for businesses, governments, academic institutions and service providers, and finally deliver more than 3/4ths of our revenue and services through our channel partners.

To our existing partners: We want to say again we greatly appreciate everything we’ve done together already and believe the best is yet to come!  We are already getting positive feedback, including Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix hosting who said, “We’re really excited to be a Zimbra Gold Partner. Positive customer feedback about our solution plus more resources from Zimbra combine to enable us to better sell the product to our target market.”

For those interested in partnering with Zimbra to resell, implement or host Zimbra, we look forward to hearing from you soon!

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.  ;)

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[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.

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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!

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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.

 

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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.