Zimbra

With its 1.0 GA announcement this week, Zimbra Desktop is officially launched as an open source, full featured desktop mail client. I’d like to use this occasion to reflect back at an interesting approach that the Zimbra engineering team took in developing this product.

Zimbra Desktop behaves like a classic desktop application. It installs and runs on a user’s computer. Even though it’s designed to aggregate mail, calendar and address book data from many Web services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, it runs and interacts with user independent of any particular Web service. However for anyone who’s curious enough to take a peek under the hood, she will find Web oriented technology at every turn.

Using technology originally designed for the Web in desktop application development is not anything new, let alone unique. Both Microsoft and Adobe have been pushing for their brand of RIA (Rich Internet Application) platforms, namely Sliverlight and AIR, and I have seen quite a few desktop products built on one or the other. Of course Mozilla XUL based desktop applications like Thunderbird and Songbird have been around even longer. However what makes Zimbra Desktop a unique case is the engineering approach. We are developing two products, an enterprise server product and a desktop application, in lockstep in the same code base.

The enterprise server in this case is Zimbra Collaboration Suite Server. It is a carrier grade email collaboration server running at many Fortune 500 companies, universities and large Internet Service Providers. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) has support for many clients, including a state-of-the-art Ajax Web client. So what is the desktop application, Zimbra Desktop? In short, Zimbra Desktop is a special build of ZCS that installs the ZCS Server and the Ajax client on the same user computer, collapsing the client and server tiers into one. In terms of their designated roles, the two products can’t be more different. Using an analogy, if I were to claim that Exchange Server and Outlook client share more than 95% of the code between them, few people would believe me. But the equivalent is true in the case of ZCS and Zimbra Desktop.

We didn’t do this just to be cool. We did it for these benefits:

1) Code reuse - lower development cost
2) Code reuse - lower maintenance cost
3) Code reuse - lower user learning cost

The first two points are self evident. The third point about lower user learning cost is due to the fact that the Zimbra Desktop UI is virtually identical to that of the ZCS Ajax web client, so a user familiar with the ZCS Ajax UI doesn’t have to learn a new UI when running Zimbra Desktop. As a matter of fact many ZCS users are also Zimbra Desktop users, often switching between the two as they move between computers. Moreover, the high level of code overlap between the two products not only makes development cheaper but also brings innovation to market faster, because a new feature added to one is automatically available in the other in most cases.

Here is a component diagram of Zimbra Desktop.

At the core of Zimbra Desktop there lies the “micro edition” of the ZCS Server. The Ajax client talks to the local server in a way not much different from the online Ajax client to a real ZCS server. The most significant addition in Zimbra Desktop is the data synchronization engine, which synchronizes user data in the cloud with data on the local computer disk, making the data accessible even when there’s no network connectivity like during air travel.

Making ZCS Server run on a user computer is easy because a) it’s a Java application that can run on many OS platform, and b) it has enough tuning knobs built-in to be dialed down to support a user of one. The ZCS Web container is Jetty, also a product especially good at scaling up as well as scaling down.

One topic we can’t avoid in any discussion of Zimbra Desktop is its integrated browser, Mozilla Prism. Prism is a simple browser built on XULRunner in the same way as Firefox is a full featured browser built from the same code base. As a solution to render the Zimbra Desktop UI, there’s no more ideal fit than Prism as the ZCS Ajax client runs in Prism out of box, just like in Firefox. In addition, we also rely on Prism’s XPCOM layer and other native bindings for OS integration on Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms such as Ubuntu, to support features like pop-up notifications and “mailto” link handling. It’s plugin framework allows us to do things like add attachments to emails simply by dragging them from their desktop into the compose area, or upload files to briefcase in the same way. While Prism is a perfect choice for us in developing the hybrid online/offline solutions, I should point out that both Silverlight and AIR can work well for other products. In the case of Zimbra Desktop however, Prism and the underlying XULRunner allow us to best protect our investment in the UI.

Finally, a word on why we still choose to build a desktop application when many are moving in the opposite direction, from desktop to the Web. We believe there’s the need for a mail client to be independent of any Web services and to be under the total control of an end user. While there are now products like Google Gears to allow taking a Web application offline in a generic fashion, in the end a Web application can only offer limited ways for third party customization. Many users spend a good part of their work day with a mail client, so it’s very important to allow the freedom to extend the software to best suit each user’s unique needs to be productive. With Zimbra Desktop, the third party extension mechanism is called Zimlets. This is our standard framework to enable Web service mash-ups that adds additional functionality, like Web conferencing or Twittering, directly into the email application with tight integration. In Zimbra Desktop 1.0, Zimlets can be downloaded and injected by end users; in 1.1, our next major revision, we will provide a more seamless way for end users to explore and manage Zimlets.

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JJ Zhuang is lead developer for Zimbra Desktop.

With more than 2.4 million downloads, 7,500 forum posts and two years in the making it’s been a long road to this point… we are now happy to announce the general availability of Zimbra Desktop.

The free Windows, Mac, and Linux download is available now.

Century 21 agents spend many hours a day away from their reliable office network connections. The introduction of Zimbra Desktop allows us to continue reducing our dependence on Microsoft Outlook while retaining the superior Zimbra collaboration platform that we can now use wherever and whenever we need it. — Marge Patterson, Vice President CENTURY 21 Realty Group Companies

A lot of work and fine tuning has been done to create the best possible companion to the Zimbra AJAX Web experience, throughout that process your feedback has been invaluable!

For those less familiar, Zimbra Desktop is unique because it gives you centralized access to your Zimbra email inbox (or inboxes from virtually any external source)- plus your calendar, contacts, documents, tasks and briefcase- whether you are online or offline. We think it is the most advanced email application available, a hybrid combining the best qualities of traditional mail clients with a modern webmail experience, and the first to elegantly marry local and cloud storage so all communication information is at a user’s fingertips.

Since Zimbra Desktop supports any email account (plus contacts and calendars for Yahoo! and Google) we hope it’s the most convenient way to keep you organized and in touch with coworkers, friends and family. Additionally, with the latest Zimbra technologies, including faster indexed search, conversation views and tagging, you can easily handle large inboxes and quickly find important pictures, documents or messages from people you care about.

With Zimbra Desktop filling a big gap between free email applications with basic functionality and premium applications that may be cost prohibitive, we have seen a steady list of customers embrace the product, including Red Hat, Gyro International and 21st Century Realty Group. Zimbra Desktop gives their employees a better overall experience, provides offline “airplane mode” capabilities, works cross-platform and makes life easier for their IT departments by backing up end-user desktop data in the cloud.

Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer at Red Hat recently shared his impressions on Zimbra and Zimbra Desktop:

“We recently swapped out our legacy email and calendar systems for Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which has received high marks throughout the company, and with the general availability of Zimbra Desktop, we can now offer all of our employees a sleek solution for both Web-based and desktop communication. We are especially pleased that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is based on open source technology and that it performs very effectively in our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”

We have always been dedicated to offering our customers freedom of choice to meet your diverse collaboration needs for work, school, or home, and Zimbra Desktop brings your most important communications to you in one place, wherever you are. Zimbra Desktop is free for anyone to use whether you are a Zimbra customer or not. (Zimbra customers have an additional benefit of support from us when using Zimbra Desktop with a Zimbra email account).

Download Zimbra Desktop today and take your email, calendar, and contacts with you on any plane, train, or automobile!

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Help us spread the spread the word – put a Zimbra Desktop badge on your website.

 

We launched the first public version of Zimbra Desktop back in March of 2007, and it’s only fitting we celebrate its birthday with another release. Someone will have to make more cupcakes.

The early-adopters upgrade program we implemented in Release Candidate 1, as well as those who have joined the network edition support program, have provided great feedback; we assure you there will be no “terrible two’s” for this offline client. Infact the toddler analogy isn’t a very good comparison at all.

We’ve been at this game for a while - tweaking Zimbra sync to include every feature of the online client, adding support for a slew of common hosting providers (that proves great when you don’t have network access for whatever reason), and working directly with the Mozilla team to create some Prism enrichments that have changed the world’s expectation of a standalone web-app. In short, Zimbra Desktop’s maturity is better measured in dog years; and that’s just version 1.0

 

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If you’re just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time you can grab the RC2 installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

For those into the latest you can even build from source, and a quick changelog is available over in the wiki.

Themes that is.

Some know that you can append ?skin=name to the end of your server’s url to test a skin without changing your preference value, but here’s another way to open a bunch at once - the Skin Previewer Zimlet.

Select those you wish to try out, and new browser windows are opened for side by side comparison:

(You can download com_zimbra_skinpreviewer over in the gallery for use against ZCS 5.0.11+ or ZD RC1.)

So you’ve checked out available themes - now how to take advantage of them all? Beach, Waves, and Yahoo tend to be our favorites; but every so often a dose of Lemongrass, Hot Rod, Zmail, or Steel is in order.


Switch themes daily, or whatever frequency you desire using the new Skin Changer Zimlet:

 

 

 

 
Gallery Page: com_zimbra_skinchanger (ZCS 5.0.11+ / ZD)

 

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Need ideas for your own themes? Checkout the theme creation guide or the chameleon attributes for simple branding.

Sometimes there’s so much going on that we can’t take time to look forward on our calendars. Which always means scrambling at the last minute to get a present, send a card, or plan a party. A few social apps have saved me - barely. While there is an RFE you can vote for, Raja has once again come to the rescue with another Zimlet.

Kick off a scan of your existing contacts via the panel:

Choose exactly who to create reminders for, then select how many alerts you want and when to display them:

Like the Email Reminder Zimlet, we make use of a separate calendar for the re-occurring events; again marked as private / not shown in your free-busy status:

A short video of the new Zimlet in action:




You can find com_zimbra_birthdayreminder in the Gallery for use against ZCS 5.0.12+ (Zimbra Desktop install directions are over here).

More Info for Alerts

Often when I have an event or meeting coming up, other relevant information (like a phone bridge, remote session information, or who’s attending) is deep within the body but hard to get to from the current appointment alert.

com_zimbra_openappointment started as a separate add-on, but is now part of the alerts dialog code. It inserts a link so you can quickly navigate to your calendar for further details:

While an enhancement like this may not seem like much, it serves to highlight the convenience of using mashups to extend the UI to your needs.

 

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Like it? Got a great idea for a extending Zimbra? Leave a comment below or drop in over at the Zimlets forum section.

Internally of late we refer to him as “The Zimlet Machine”, since Raja has been pumping them out so fast it’s hard to keep up. Now there are so many new mashups to show off we’ve declared it Zimlet Month. So browse the gallery, try out the experimental Zimlets in the source, and even if your not a developer you can drop us an idea for new ones, or just mention tweaks you’d like to see made to existing Zimlets over in the community forums.

Ok it may not be a continuous month - a few of these will require 5.0.14, and others depend upon core changes to 6.0.x; they’ll be in your server’s zimlet directories shortly. If your not into running the 6.0 betas, teaser screencasts are attached; check them out and start the feedback rolling - we want to make these Zimlets exactly what you expect of them when it’s time to deploy.
 

Honestly how many times have you flagged something, only to forget to check your ‘is:flagged’ search? The same goes for a ‘followup’ tag. I’m definitely guilty of it. How do you not forget about those important emails? Create an appointment reminder right?

One might drag critical emails to the mini-cal, mark them private, remove the meeting invites for any pre-filled attendees, and store the events in another calendar to stay clutter free; but first you have to remember to do it, plus it’s multiple steps. The Email Reminder Zimlet solves all that without pulling you away from your inbox.

Flagging an email creates an appointment with a reminder set a few hours later by default:

You can also use it on drag to the panel icon, or when composing an email to take care of creation twice as fast:




 

 

 

 
The events show up on a separate ‘Email Reminders’ calendar so you can easily toggle visibility; they’re marked as private and set to show as free in order to not obscure your free-busy status:



 

 

 

 

A quick screencast of the Zimlet in action:




Gallery download link: com_zimbra_emailreminder

Requires 5.0.12+ (5.0.11 w/o flagging capability). It can also be used in Zimbra Desktop RC1 - we’re working on multiple ways to make them easier to install in the desktop client, but you can find current directions here.

 

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Enjoy this Zimlet or have an idea for enhancing it?

-Perhaps a per-user setting for the default reminder time?
-Would you like us to go with just single click buttons for 1 day / 3 days / 7days / 2 weeks / 1 month?
-Or even a “silent” appointment creation setting that doesn’t prompt you?

Let us know what you think in the comments!

There have been alphas and betas. We took all the benefits of a rich AJAX web-client into the offline application world (including fast search, platform independence, and mash-ups, in addition to drag-n-drop; for both the client navigation and in uploading of files from your desktop). People have told us we started a revolution in local access to mail, calendar, tasks, documents, and briefcase items when we introduced full sync with Zimbra accounts. I’m inclined to agree - but we also knew it was about freedom of your data, regardless of where it might be stored, so we expanded Zimbra Desktop to work with more providers than a Swiss Army knife has tools.

Zimbra’s been in the offline world for 2 years, and we’ve got an impressive roadmap of desktop features lined up that’s about to rock the collaboration world. Release candidate 1 is a feature complete product for the planned 1.0 general availability release, and includes many bug fixes since the packed beta 5. This version is also the first release that is available to be included in our support program for our network edition customers; those interested should contact their sales rep to participate.

Our desktop releases have been churned out roughly every three months, and many are just so excited for new updates that we decided to implement an early-adopters upgrade program as well. Your given the option to participate in the testing network by checking a box during the last screen of installation:

One click, and your desktop is now on the fast track to receive our same internal upgrade pushes. They aren’t true “nighties” per-say, but we hope to release updates in the week to month range after a little quality assurance.
 

Download it via auto-update, build from source, or for those just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time: You can grab the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.
 

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Have an idea for extending Zimbra? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.

Version 5.0.12 of our collaboration suite is now available for download!

Some enhancements of note for admins:

• 33358 - Postfix policy on validating RCPT TO content for minimizing backscatter spam for alias domains. (postfix_enable_smtpd_policyd)
• 33720 - By mapping alias to real domains we can allow auth with alias domain addresses and send out-of-office notifications for alias domains. (zimbraDomainAliasTargetId)

For users:

• 34751 - Avoid unnecessary appointment blob access for calendar summary viewing to produce faster cal tab loading.
• 6082 - Notification for delegate stores/shared folders.

Pushing change notifications to the UI eliminates the need for manual refreshes. An excellent thing as we approach simultaneous editing of the same document.

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Zimbra Desktop meanwhile will be leaving beta 5 for the release candidate stage later this month. With a new early-adopters upgrade program as well; I know many of you testers are excited for a faster release pace.

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.

This version of Zimbra Desktop brings us close to a full suite of online & offline features, definitely try it out. Incase you’ve missed all the new stuff packed into previous editions, stop by the respective blog entries on Beta 4 & Beta 3.

We are very excited to announce the arrival of sharing in Zimbra Desktop for ZCS accounts!

• This is currently done by proxying, so no data of guest mailboxes are downloaded/cached offline to the local computer.



• Existing users may need to ‘trigger sync’. Simply edit the mountpoint online using the web-client (such as renaming it) to force availability in Zimbra Desktop. This is because mailbox sync is token based, and for data types newly introduced in desktop we don’t go back in time to acquire them. (Additionally, creating shares from the desktop client will be addressed with the ZCS 5.0.12 release.)
• Pushing change notifications to the UI when working with shared content is no small task, even for the ZCS server/client. The team managed to address delegate store/shared folder updates and even implemented cross-server notification support, eliminating the need for manual refreshes.

Of course the enhancements don’t stop there:

• Everyone raved about this in our Yahoo! Calendar Beta front-end, so it was time to bring the feature into play for Zimbra Desktop - introducing “Fisheye” view:




• Yahoo! & Google Calendar Sync - it’s all about CalDAV. (Give the new Yahoo! Calendar powered by Zimbra a spin.)

 

• Beta 4 added address book integration for Ymail accounts, and Beta 5 extends that to Gmail users. Enable in account setup; actual contacts vs auto added ‘emailed contacts’ distinction is underway.



• Built-in Inquisitor support for the web search bar - bringing you fast lookups, auto-complete, and search history. (If you are not familiar with Inquisitor, or want to add it to another browser, you can read about it here.) To change preference settings use shift+F6 to reveal the status bar, click on the gear in the lower right, then choose Tools > Add-ons, and go to the Extensions tab; you can even toggle the search engine used.
• Revamped import/export UI available in preferences for easier access - which helps you add iCalendars and contacts from comma-separated-value format. It even provides a quick backup using the previously covered tar formatter; that’s also useful for ZCS-to-ZCS migrations, as it contains both account info and items plus associated metadata.
  
  
• Streamlined layout for the account configuration menu.
• SSL enforcement - we now detect invalid/untrusted/mismatched certificates and prompt the user if they still wish to proceed.

Grab it via auto-update, build from source, or for those just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time: You can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

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Have an idea for extending Zimbra Desktop? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.