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.
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.
Linux users have pondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice to just grab Zimbra software via repositories?”
There was just so much positive feedback over Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 (with over 900 new members to the forums last month!) we thought that Ubuntu 32-bit users should be able to grab it easily. (64-bit support is coming soon)
This brings Zimbra Desktop’s easy setup against ZCS, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and any other IMAP/POP accounts to the huge Ubuntu community - letting them take mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, documents, and briefcase items offline and sync whatever actions they may take when they’re reconnected.
To install:
sudo synaptic (As you’re read this it’s being added to Applications > Add/Remove.)
Enable the third party packages in settings > repositories.
Reload, search for “Zimbra”, and away you go. (same as a sudo apt-get install zdesktop)
Once downloaded, start via Applications > Internet:
Many thanks to the Canonical Team for showcasing us on their frontpage:
ubuntu.com/news/zimbra-desktop
Not using Ubuntu? It’s cross-platform for other Linux variants, as well as Windows and Mac -
grab it here.
You may ask: “What about the entirety of the
Zimbra Collaboration Suite Server in Ubuntu or other repositories?” We can’t say one way or the other at this point - but think of this as a harmonious step.
Find help for Zimbra Desktop over in the Community Forums, ask us a question below, or fill out the Ubuntu registration/feedback on it: ubuntu.com/register/zimbra/
We’ve aimed to blur the line between a Ajax web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal. If you’re just joining us here’s the best part: It’s an offline capable client so you can take your data with you whenever you don’t have internet access - then sync any type of interaction that you can do in normal webmail access when you get connected again. So many cool new things I don’t know where to begin - the Zimbra Desktop team has been very busy since Beta 2.
They’re here, and your tasks, documents, & briefcase items can now follow you wherever you may roam. If you’re already using Zimbra Desktop against a Zimbra Collaboration Suite server these will show up on next edit or item move via delta sync - while a full account sync or reset will pull in prior items. Personally, having briefcase items available offline is a major plus - as offline calendaring using the same AJAX web-client interface has already long since won me over.
Yahoo! Mail users rejoice - There’s now IMAP access through Zimbra Desktop to all free, plus, and business accounts. You didn’t read that wrong. Normally only
Plus accounts have POP access, but as a perk when using Zimbra Desktop the mail is synced via IMAP; which is a much better protocol for keeping your mail organized - and yes it’s available to free accounts as well. Hook-up your @yahoo.com account or
go grab one of the new @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses. (Note that some apps don’t sync to Yahoo! servers yet so the data is local.)
Mailto: link handler - For Mac and Windows protocol handlers allow you to click on a mailto: link in any browser, and it will bring-up Zimbra Desktop’s composer with a javascript call. If
Prism is not already running, it will start the web-app as well with a url call, then pop up compose. We don’t want to be accidentally invasive, so to turn this feature on you’ll have to check the box in global preferences to make it the default mail client on your computer.
Icon badging - To keep you informed, we now display the total number of unread messages across all-inboxes; in the dock icon for Mac and on Windows there’s now a tray icon, which changes to a new mail image if there are unread messages.
Mac & Windows users may just decide to toss out their toasters, because we now have
mail & appointment notifications built-in. (
Zimbra Toaster still serves as a lightweight new-mail checker with quick flag and delete features. There’s also some community contributed Linux solutions like
Zimbra Notify.)
Zimbra Desktop on Windows now takes advantage of the native tray icon bubbles and on Mac of course we use Growl. (You need to
install Growl separately which is quite straightforward.) You’ll also need to enable “show pop-up notification” under both Mail and Calendar tabs in preferences, since by default notifications are turned off.
The latest versions of Zimbra Collaboration Suite have also introduced browser
title & favicon flashing, mail & account tab highlighting, as well as sound notifications - which have been ported to Beta 3 as well. So there’s no excuse for not noticing a new mail if you’re at your computer. Ok, we can still think of a few excuses - but note that the pop-up notifications are per account settings; so you can have some accounts on and some accounts off if you should need to ‘forget about’ that important meeting
In-case you’ve never tried Zimbra Desktop, or are still using an
Alpha, and never tried it out during
Beta 1 or when we
served-up Beta 2: There’s also easy setup menus for setting up Zimbra Server, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, AOL, or any other IMAP/POP accounts you want to use. For Beta 3 we’ve thrown out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine
from scratch.
To get you up and running when you need it, there’s now an
auto-start service. During launch of the Prism web-app a check is run to see if the background service is running - if not, it’s automatically started. This works on all 3 platforms, and proves especially useful on Linux since the service doesn’t automatically start after reboot. (See this
forum thread for ways to do that.) There’s also an animated splash screen during launch of Prism so you know it’s working on bringing-up the background process.
Icon menus - On the Mac dock icon and Windows tray icon, we now have right-click menu items to check for updates and shutdown the background service.
Windows minimize to tray - Clicking on the “X” now only minimizes prism window to tray. To quit prism, right click the tray icon and choose “Quit”.
This release makes Zimbra Desktop available to a
quarter-billion Yahoo! users with support for 20+ languages. The default theme is a revamped Yahoo! skin to help keep the interface familiar as it spreads to those millions of users. Hope you enjoy, and as we advance upon a GA release: Thanks to the Zimbra Community for all your bug corrections and feature requests so far. The Mozilla team developed a few of these new Prism features from scratch just for us, you can read more about some of them
here. But stay tuned, we’re gonna have a closer look under the hood to see how we implemented these features and the inner workings of Prism + Zimbra Desktop in a future blog post.
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 it here for Mac, Windows, & Linux.
Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your feedback on it below or over in the Community Forums. A bunch of us are at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon this week - so drop in around booths 415 & 519 if you’re there.
The highly anticipated Beta 2 release of Zimbra Desktop is here. This feature packed release has a ton of features that our users have been asking for. Read on for more.
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Late last year, Zimbra introduced the world to a new way of thinking about AJAX applications. We took our powerful Web Client, and took it offline using technologies such as Jetty and Derby. Since then, Zimbra Desktop has been a hit, and our Engineers have been working hard to pack in new features. Well now, we’ve released Zimbra Desktop Beta 1.
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We’re happy to announce that today, Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 RC1 and Zimbra Desktop 0.58 are available now for download in both binary and source form under our new YPL license (FAQs). We’ve also gotten a ton of feedback from our users asking us for a hosted demo version of Zimbra 5.0.
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Over the last several months using Zimbra Desktop, I’ve become very dependent on having my Zimbra email available offline, and now we’re happy to announce in the latest version Zimbra calendar is available offline too.
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