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 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.
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.
Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 added a wealth of new features to our offline capable client, and Beta 4 expands upon it’s good taste.
Build 1338 introduces:
 Global Address List access against a ZCS server (both proxy and sync).
 Free-busy information proxy for ZCS users, to assist in finding that open timeslot on your colleague’s calendar.
 Archiving: Users can now move items under “Local Folders” should they need to keep their server mailbox size under quota, or just wish to not sync certain items.
 Resource &  Location scheduling UI for Zimbra accounts.
 Yahoo! Address Book integration: Another frequent request - you can enable contact sync under Setup > Account Settings.
 Microsoft Live/Hotmail Plus: This one was not even on the book, but we decided to implement mail sync via the JDAVMail API and a custom setup wizard just for the kick of it.
 In addition to secure cookie auth, we managed to implement complete SSL for all IMAP communication with Yahoo! accounts as well.
 Various UI changes to support the new enhancements, and latest code to go along with the parallel ZCS 5.0.10 release.
Per your excellent feedback, calendar sync integration with several providers is coming soon. Enjoy this release!
If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.
Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.
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.
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
 Hey, did you hear that Google released a browser? Yeah, and it’s very cool! We might have been a bit early to call Safari the Browser war winner. Based on WebKit (KHTML), this rendering framework (that Chrome uses) has really stormed the market. If you asked us five months ago who was winning the browser war, we would easily say Firefox, with Safari as a close second. With the introduction of Chrome, a new war has started.
At the start of this century, the war was about “Open-ness” and who could be more open and win the hearts of users. Now it’s a war of speed, and who’s faster. A few blogs and articles have been written, with Mozilla and Google both claiming their JS engine is faster. So who’s right? Both are faster than IE (6, 7, and 8), but in our opinion, what matters is how responsive web applications are. So who will win Zimbra’s Speed trophy?
Zimbra has a testing harness thats in alpha which we will be making available to the public in the future, that measures performance on different actions within Zimbra. This helps us understand what the end user is seeing. People can talk V8 Benchmark, Dromaeo, SunSpider, or what ever they want. What really matters is how applications perform. Our tests are pure UI performance, ie, how fast Zimbra is to the end user.
Considering that one of Zimbra’s strengths is our AJAX web interface, we decided to put Chrome to the test, along with IE, FireFox, and Safari. The control system was: Intel Core2 duo, 2.39Ghz 1.99GB RAM Windows XP
Here’s how it did (lower is faster):
Overall Performance
All Tests
Given that Chrome is built on WebKit, this didn’t come as any particularly huge surprise. In our previous tests, Safari came out the fastest renderer of the Zimbra Web Client. In our tests, Chrome came in as a very close second, and we expect it to get faster.
We want Chrome to work as good as FireFox or Internet Explorer. So, if you find an issue, please report it in the bug report below.
Want more info on the browser war? Check out these links:
Who won the browser war? - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/and-the-winner-is.html
Safari vs Safari- http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/browser-war-part-3-safari-311-nightlies.html
IE vs IE - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/browser-war-part-2-ie7-vs-ie8b.html
FF vs FF - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/05/round-1-ff2-vs-ff3rc1.html
Support Opera for Zimbra Web Client - http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5932
Hack the Zimbra Web Client to Support Chrome - http://www.zimbra.com/forums/users/21903-googles-chrome-browser.html
Part 1 covered Network Edition backup features, today’s snips apply to all editions.
First among the lesser known additions: We recently provided the possibility for a nice performance boost to some environments by adding the ability to turn on batched indexing in ZCS 5.0.3 (you can even fine tune it at the localconfig, COS, and account level). We’re not talking about when you re-index an entire account here, this is a change to the index-as-received model; now new items can sit in a ‘queue’ (really a ‘indexing deferred’ flag on the mail_items table of the pertaining mboxgroup database in MySQL) to run all at once when it reaches the zimbraBatchedIndexingSize threshold, saving you from all the tiny disk thrashing. It might not be immediately apparent that this works better, but you can mention it in the forums and we’ll show you the evidence to the contrary - it proves expecially useful for POP heavy or ZAD archive accounts.
New & Enhanced Admin Tools
Your /opt/zimbra/bin & /opt/zimbra/libexec directories hold a wealth of tools to make your job easier.
zmdumpenv has been around for a long time, but underutilized - it grabs the basics that you should probably provide with every issue to help others understand where you’re coming from.
When you need to send ad-hoc SOAP commands to the server, the powerful zmsoap takes care of authenticating, generating the envelope, sending the request, and writing the response to stdout.
If your server freezes or is busy, running zmdialog can give that ‘my server hung’ support ticket a purpose. With JDK 1.5 it won’t collect a heap dump so you might also run /opt/zimbra/java/bin/jmap -heap:format=b [/opt/zimbra/log/zmmailboxd_java.pid] however zmdiaglog collects a core dump, from which it should be theoretically possible to get a heap dump. Thread dumps when you kill -QUIT/3 [pid] are helpful too. Info on ways to take them (like /opt/zimbra/libexec/zmmailboxdmgr threaddump) plus a handy script, are here.
There’s the MySQL metadata DB, the Lucene index, and the actual blob files on disk in /opt/zimbra/store. If you can click on a folder in the web UI and get results, it means MySQL is up and happy. If you open a message and get the infamous “missing blob for id” error, it means that the message files on disk aren’t where they’re supposed to be (ie: disk crash, not mounted/permissions, or you’ve recently pointed your volumes incorrectly). There’s all sorts of things you can do in that situation - here’s a more detailed list. Even if you don’t have a good grasp of the mailbox database structure yet, you can appreciate the need to easily determine if those blobs are still available (after you’ve moved whatever you can salvage of the store from corrupted drives to a better location). Enter the zmblobchk utility which can determine what files are missing - there’s also plans for a repair mode, for when you finally realize the blobs are gone and want to get rid of those UI error messages. Of course you’ll next consult the Network Edition’s restoreToTime feature or other backup solution you may have.
When you’re absolutely out of room on the disks housing your DB (seriously put in that purchase order for more storage - it’s cheap these days) in a pinch the optimizeMboxgroups.pl script (available in the public cache and added to the upcoming 5.0.10) can help you recover wasted space in your mail_item, appointment, imap_folder, imap_message, open_conversation, pop3_message, revision, and tombstone tables on each mboxgroup. Just note that it temporarily locks each table, and could use considerable IO while they’re being rebuilt. You can certainly use it pro-actively during a maintenance window to reclaim space as well.
There’s also a new wiki page on statistic collection so you can generate nice charts that help you figure out what you might need to tweak.
We could go on and on about the utilities in those folders, so throw up a test environment and experiment sometime - it may just make life easier when you have hundreds of users breathing down your neck. And if you should ever be ’stumbling around in the dark’ you can always enable additional debug logging to shed more light on the situation.
You can find help for all the above utilities over in the Community Forums or ask us a question on them below.
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.)
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