Zimbra

This is one people have asked about a lot. Starting with Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, we will be providing a formal Zimlet Developer’s Guide and API Reference. The goal of this documentation is to make it easier for partners and customers to build Zimlets and to integrate with the Zimbra platform. As we’ve built this documentation, here are some of our guiding principles:

• Easy to find. Make the documentation online and “wiki-based” for easy access.
• Reduce “wondering” between versions. Maintain documentation with each ZCS release so when new major versions of ZCS are delivered (and changes are made to the APIs), people on older ZCS releases can still access their “version specific” documentation.
• Lower overhead to get started. Make developing Zimlets possible without having to download the entire product source. Of course, product source will still be available for those who want it but we want to make even advanced Zimlet tasks (for example, compiling templates) possible without needed the entire source tree.

Here are links to the new developer documentation:

Zimlet Developer’s Guide for ZCS 6.0
http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=ZCS_6.0:Zimlet_Developers_Guide:Introduction

Zimlet Definition File Reference for ZCS 6.0
http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=ZCS_6.0:Zimlet_Developers_Guide:Zimlet_Definition_File_Reference

Zimlet JavaScript API Reference for ZCS 6.0
http://files.zimbra.com/docs/zimlet/zcs/6.0/jsdocs/index.html

These are living documents and we will be adding content & more information over the coming weeks. With this first-launch, we are looking for your thoughts on the best ways you enjoy learning and making use of the new material, as well as ideas and suggestions about Zimlet topics that you think we should cover. Please provide feedback and comments in the forums at:

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimlets/35951-new-zimlet-developer-documentation-zcs-6-0-available.html

Pay attention to the extra bar at the top to navigate around the wiki pages:

Whether you just want dozens of examples, a list of all the elements in the Zimlet Definition File…or want to dive into advanced topics like Templates and Portals, we plan to leave no stone unturned.

  

Happy coding!

Power Zimlet #3

If you have 100s or even 1000s of contacts and perhaps also using multiple address books and want to organize them, this one is for you. With lot of contacts also comes organization or maintenance, syncing and other issues.  For example, say you want to move all your company’s contacts into one address book so you can share company’s address book to someone,  or,  say file all of them by “(Company) First Name Last Name” format so its easy to sort them and differentiate them,  you will immediately see there is no easy way to do that.

And that’s where this Zimlet come in. Its  a very powerful and flexible Zimlet and provides 5 different ways (& several combination) to help organize your contacts. It also organizes across multiple Address books (simply use ctrl -key or Shift-key to select multiple folders).

1. Move or Cleanup:
- Move all contacts with xyz domain  in ALL address book folders into xyz Addressbook.

For example,  say  you want to move all gmail contacts to folder called ‘gmail friends’.  Assuming you already have an addessbook folder by name ‘gmail friends’,  here is how you would do that:

STEPS:

1. Select “Contact’s email contains” menu,
2. Enter “gmail.com” in the next field
3. Select all the folders using Shift key or ctrl key  from “in folder(s): ” menu
4. Select ‘Move Contacts to:’ Radio button
5. Select the folder ‘gmail friends’
6. Press Organize

Other use cases:
-  Move some Contacts in ALL  Address Book to Trash

-  Move ALL  Contacts in Some Address Book to Trash

-  Move ALL  Contacts in ALL Address Book to Trash

2. Merge:

- Move all contacts  in multiple Address-books(say AB2, AB3 & AB4)  to a single address book(AB1)

3. “Sort and Store” aka “file-As”:

- Zimbra by default sorts contacts by last name but lot of people want to sort by Company and one of the way you can achieve this is by filing them as “(Company) Firstname Lastname” or “Company Lastname, FirstName” or “Company”

- You can use File-as Action to simply file all your contacts in a specific format for consistent appearance.

4. Tag:

- Tag all contacts that contains some domain(say zimbra.com) with some tag(say: zimbra folks)

5. Contacts with Phone number(for mobile sync): This is one of the special actions I added to help mobile users to move all the contacts that has phone number to one folder. Which in-turn makes it easier to make phone calls.
e.g. move all contacts with phone numbers to “has phone number” Address book. Now, sync it to mobile phone and you can be sure to know that the contacts in that folder has some phone number.

PS:
1. For more details and to download: Visit Gallery
2. Please make sure to to take backup of all your Address books  before using this (from Preferences > Address Book > Export)

Power Zimlet #2

Every now and then we get messages from co-workers and others that we are not interested in. It gets annoying especially when  it becomes a huge back-and-forth thread of conversation.  And we fall into this gray-area where we don’t necessarily want to manually filter them or, we don’t want to see such conversations either. So we end-up constantly deleting them as and when they arrive.

For example: I am a front-end engineer and I belong to a broad-distribution list called ‘engineering’.  And although I usually read messages from this distribution list, at times I see message-threads regarding server-side  engineering or something else that I don’t necessarily care about.

So ideally, we should be able to click-a-button to unsubscribe or ignore a ’specific’ conversation but continue to get other messages as usual.

Now with this Zimlet you get a ‘ignore’ toolbar button. When you click on the ‘ignore’ button, this Zimlet takes the subject of the message and creates a filter ‘on-the-fly’ and also move that message to “Ignored Messages” folder. Because of this filter, we will prevent any future messages of that thread from showing up in your Inbox or your folder.

And secondly, as you know, since such message threads lasts only for a week or two so, we expire these filters every 10-days(by default). This expiration date also helps in keeping the filter from bloating.

PS:
- You need to manually Turn-ON the Zimlet by clicking on it in the left-panel.
-  We only create a single filter called “Move these messages to Ignored messages Folder” and we add/remove ’subject’ conditions within this filter.

For more information and to download:Visit Zimlets Gallery

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With the first ZCS 6.0 Beta recently released, and our product tracking portal turning greener and greener, the “I’m so excited and can’t wait!” comments in the forums become reminiscent of kids opening presents. There are always a slew of great features and improvements in the oven, so we’ve prepared a little sneak peak into what we’re cooking up for the advanced AJAX web-client in Zimbra 6.0.

Lots of us have composed a new mail or appointment, only to need something else in another message; so the launch in a separate window icon has become prominent in everyday use. Others like the same browser instance, and choose not to select the ‘always compose in a new window’ option – as it can sometimes take a few seconds to load, and previously didn’t contain all the same functionality. Without using the detached window feature, when creating several messages there was no easy way to switch besides saving and opening from drafts. How to handle the need to open multiple items within the same client? Tabs of course.

(The tabs are revealed on new compose, or upon opening deep message-view.)

Meanwhile the prevalence of cheaper LCD technology has many adopting multi-monitor setups, and netbooks typically trade height for wider screens that fit keyboard layouts; the flip in horizontal & vertical horizons means the traditional reading pane on the bottom might not take advantage of all the screen’s real estate. Enter the right hand reading pane or ‘third panel’ view:

Some like reading the newest message in an expanded conversation first to bring them up to speed, while others prefer a logical ordered sort – you can now pick either.

(We’ve also implemented a column view variation in the standard HTML client.)

Grab ZCS 6.0 Beta 1 from the downloads page; or nightly source from the perforce cache (the new buildZCS script makes it easier than ever). Then give us your feedback, or stay current with all the improvements over in Bugzilla, PMweb, and the Community Forums.

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.