Zimbra

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 weather you take it on a plane, train, rv, or boat. 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
We love poker at Zimbra so with July we get to watch the world series and we get to play at our very own poker tables.  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.

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.

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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.

 

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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.
 

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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.