Zimbra

For the last post in the Power Zimlet Series (Attach Email, Ignore Conversations, Contact Organizer, Task Reminders), we are ending on a lighter note.

Zimlet 5: Emoticons in Email

Who doesn’t love emoticons? They are core part of life online and I admit am a huge fan of them.

Historically Zimbra has always supported emoticons – but only in IM.   For ZCS 6.0 (coming very soon) we have made some enhancements to the Zimlet platform (including the ability to create new ‘application tabs’) that enable us to now support emoticons in email compose as well.

When you write an email you can simply enter your standard text emoticon [example: :)  ], or now you can select an emoticon visually using a button in the compose window that will insert the text for you (see below).  When you receive an email, emoticon text is automatically displayed as an image.

Now, emoticons are great but occasionally you might not want to see emoticons in your email, may be because some code or some text that’s unintentionally matching emoticons. So, we have added “Temporarily Disable in Mail” to help disable emoticons. Right click on the Zimlet in the left pane, and select it, then reopen the email. Further, Double click on Zimlet in the over-view panel to permanently enable/disable it.

Enjoy!

PS: This will be shipped as a default Zimlet in ZCS 6.0.

In the last 3 posts in the Power Zimlet series we covered tools for improving email and contacts: contact organizer, ignoring conversations and attaching emails to messages.  Today we are turning to a new application in ZCS that many, including myself, find incredibly useful – Tasks.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite has had the Tasks application for some time now, but as of yet it doesn’t support reminders.  And without reminders it is hard to keep track of Tasks at hand, making it sometimes hard to use.  This new Zimlet fills that gap by providing a reminder digest once a day.

Zimlet 4: Tasks Reminders

How the Zimlet works:
Once a day (when you first login), this Zimlet searches for your Tasks (and shared Tasks) and displays a list of all Tasks that are overdue, in-progress, etc. This list is shown only for Tasks that are due 2-weeks (14 days) from today and continues to show for 2-weeks post due-date. This date range is user configurable.

Additional Features:
- It also has a “Send Email” Feature, which helps in follow up of tasks. For example: You might want to send mail to someone asking why they are lagging behind their tasks, etc.
- You can click on the Zimlet and press “Show Again” to see the Reminder dialogs again anytime.

Below is a picture of the Tasks Reminder dialog that appears (sorted by date urgency).

As usual, you can get this and learn more in the Zimbra Gallery.

Up next: Emoticons in Email

As a long-time Zimbra developer and employee, I’ve spent countless hours each week using Zimbra email.  I love the overall experience, especially because I have been able to tailor it to my personal style using Zimlets.  They are easy to create and over time I have built quite a few.  So without further ado, the following is the first of a 5 post series featuring new Zimlets which I think are incredibly useful and empower Zimbra users.

Zimlet 1: Attach Emails

Every so often I miss the ability to easily to attach an earlier email while composing an new email message.  This Zimlet does just that, it adds an “Attach Email” tab in the Attachments dialog in Mail Compose. Once you click on the Email tab you can search for emails that you want to attach or just scroll the list. You can even ‘browse’ for emails by clicking on the folder tree.  Finally, something I really like is with any of these methods you can also select multiple emails and attach them simultaneously.

Here is how it works… assume you are composing or replying to an email and now you want to attach some earlier email…

1. Click on the Add Attachment Button

2. Click on the Attach Mail tab

3. Search or browse for emails (in this case below I’m looking in the Sent folder)

4. Select the email(s) you want to attach – ctrl to select multiple.

5. Click Attach button

You can repeat these steps again if you want for more emails or other attachment types.

Note – you need ZCS 5.0.15 and above or 6.x to use this Zimlet.

Next post… Ignoring Conversations.

Zimbra’s open source roots have always been of great importance to both the company and the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).  When we set out to build a new collaboration system over five years ago, we wanted to bring a fresh perspective to the market, and a big part of that was our commitment to being open source.  We understood sharing ideas within the open source community keeps you a one step ahead of competitors by iterating faster to give users what they want.  A great example demonstrating how the community has flourished is the Zimlet development program.

Zimlets are simple but powerful extensions of ZCS that connect users’ email, calendar, and contacts with any number of outside services (for a couple of recent examples see Alfresco and Peru and TripIt).  Zimlet development growth in the community has been strong and steady, and we are excited to continue supporting the community’s work by providing a place where developers can feature the best of their integrations to share with other Zimbra users.   So, today we are launching an updated Zimlet Gallery where you can pick and choose from many handy new ZCS extensions.

At the same time, we also love seeing our Yahoo! friends continue to embrace openness as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. In addition to this announcement today, a number of our Yahoo! brethren are extending their platforms to become more open. Today, Yahoo! Mail is introducing applications which enable people to make online payments, access personal photos and more easily send large files directly from their inbox. In addition, My Yahoo! is adding even more third-party applications, driving enhanced personal productivity for users directly from their My Yahoo! start page. You can read more about the Mail and My Yahoo! updates on the Yodel and YDN blogs.

As part of the Zimlet Gallery launch today, we’d like to introduce you to a few new third-party Zimlets, including:

Xythos Zimlet – The Xythos Zimlet allows you to drag and drop email messages and file attachments directly into Xythos’ Enterprise Document Management System.  Secure document management is popular in the enterprise and universities; integration in email is key for ubiquitous adoption.

Processmaker Zimlet – The Processmaker Zimlet helps streamline workflows, like time-off requests, all within Zimbra email (see above).  This Zimlet is already becoming popular and is being deployed at Access America Transport and Ministerio de Vivienda by our Zimbra Partners.

In addition, Zimbra developers have created a handful of new Zimlets, including:

Place Sticky Notes on Email – The new Sticky Notes Zimlet allows you to attach and tag emails with “notes.” One can leave comments, reminders, additional info about the email and more. And Zimbra’s powerful search can search through emails based on the contents of the tags/notes attached to the email.

Email Highlighter – The Colored Emails Zimlet allows you to apply personally assigned colors to emails from specific senders such as a family member, your boss, etc. You can identify senders by color, but you can also create colored emails through tags, making it easier to prioritize any inbox.

Save Email as Documents – With one click, the Email-2-Doc Zimlet lets you save an important email as a Zimbra Document; it will automatically save any attachments as links in the Document as well. The email can then be edited and shared with others.

At Zimbra we’re always trying to provide our community with the most efficient tools for organizing email, address books, calendars and web documents, so it’s only natural that we look to work with other with companies who are as enthusiastic about streamlined processes as we are, and share the same commitment to open standards.

One of the latest things you can now do with Zimbra is integrate with TripIt – an innovative service that organizes and shares your travel itinerary. With TripIt, users simply email their booked travel plans to TripIt, and the service will create a master travel itinerary plan. Users may then access or share this itinerary online, via their mobile device, or from their personal calendar.

This is where we step in. Because Zimbra is an open platform, users of TripIt can instantly access flight times, hotel arrivals, and much more from the convenience of their own Zimbra calendar automatically.  The integration is especially useful in business settings, as Zimbra’s shareable schedule options and synched group calendars allow employees to view their own work-related travel itinerary alongside their co-workers’ in a shared Zimbra calendar. This way, all are kept in the loop regarding everyone’s travel whereabouts at work.

This integration also takes advantage of a number of open standards that are supported by Zimbra and TripIt including email and iCal.  Here’s how you can get TripIt integration within your Zimbra account:

1.   Go to TripIt.com and create an account
2.   When you receive an email from your travel company, forward it to plans@tripit.com
3.   Go to TripIt and find the iCal feed URL and find the URL to subscribe to your calendar
4.   Go back to Zimbra and create a new calendar called “My Trips” or whatever you prefer to call it
5.   Paste in the iCal URL after you select sync with external cal
6.   Right click refresh and your trip calendar should appear!

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.

iCalendar (the standard .ics not the Apple program) only gets you so far. We’ve previously covered CalDav in Apple’s iCal for Mac, but where does the CalDav field stand for Windows and Linux users?

It’s important to push communication between different programs, platforms, and technologies. We’ve just completed a free-busy interop that we’ll blog more about that later, but you can checkout the forum announcement.   This week, Jong L. and John H. are at CalConnect Roundtable XII from June 2nd to 6th, 2008. Where they’re doing some heavy testing with other clients and servers to make sure that we’re compatible and standards-compliant.

A good consortium for that is CalConnect’s Interoperability Test Events (C.I.T.E.) the latest we attended during a previous Roundtable back in February. It included all sorts of IOP and Mobile IOP events, where interoperability testing between different calendaring and scheduling implementations were preformed. Organizations participating in the C.I.T.E. events were Apple, Microsoft, Zimbra (Yahoo!), Oracle, Sun, Kerio, Marware, Scalix, and Sony Ericsson.

While there’s plenty of CalDav compatible programs out there our server-team judges are firm: Pizazz and setup wizards won’t get you anywhere if you can’t correct that meeting time or properly notify others of the change.

If you want strict specification adherence in a cross-app & cross-platform thick-client: Our winner is Mulbery for Linux, Windows, & Mac. In addition to being a Swiss-army-knife of protocols, it’s also Open Source.

How to set it up? Checkout the wiki article CalDav and Mulberry – Zimbra :: Wiki or drop in over at the community forums for help.

Download and give it a try: http://www.mulberrymail.com/

For those of us who live and breath by our calendar, making sure that you always have access to it, is a must. Enter the CalDAV Protocol: A standardized way for different clients to access one calendar. Leopard’s (OS 10.5) iCal application has built in CalDav support, and it works great with Zimbra 5.0. Here’s a quick overview.

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Zimbra has a toaster for Mac, and a toaster for Windows…but didn’t have a toaster for Linux until pbruna came along with his adaptation of the checkgmail program by Owen Marshall. Linux fanboys rejoice, your toaster is here (bread not included).

If you haven’t had time to drop by the forums lately here’s a quick preview of a recent community contributed project.

Our Linux users have been keeping an eye on this RFE, as it would make a nice complement to Zimbra Desktop.

Bugzilla has a ton of your cool ideas that we’re working hard to get finished. In the meantime, Linux users: how do you find out when that e-mail you’re expecting, has come in?

PBruna has come to the rescue with a toaster-like sibling!

He’s also hard at work to produce a SOAP based version so that it will do things like:

You can grab his current version over at the Zimbra Gallery.

Wiki: ZimbraNotify – Zimbra :: Wiki
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