Zimbra

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
We love poker at Zimbra so with July we get to watch the world series and we get to play at our very own poker tables.  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).

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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.

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 25,000 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.

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.)