Zimbra

Just a bit on new stuff that’s graced the Zimlet scene lately:

Xythos
Drag and drop your emails (including entire conversations with meta-data or just the attachments) from Zimbra into an Xythos folder of your choosing. Create new emails and link to documents stored on an Xythos content management server for internal accounts - you can even configure expiring tickets to share material with external users.

See it in action here, then contact info@xythos.com if you’d like to try it out.

Dimdim
Join a Dimdim web conference without leaving your inbox; start a meeting right from an email with a single click, drag contacts from your address book, or even drop any appointments in your calendar onto the Zimlet and instantly schedule a Dimdim session.

Dimdim is an awesome open source meeting platform that lets you share your presentations, documents, whiteboards, or desktop (currently Win & Mac with Linux on the roadmap) - and gets you connected via chat, VoIP, or webcam. Run your own server, use their hosted options, or create a free account that lets you connect with up to twenty people at once - attendees don’t even need to be registered.

Grab the Zimet here.

Alfresco
The first content management Zimlet by Starxpert let you save emails, conversations with attachments, or folders onto an Alfresco space.

A newly developed Zimlet from the folks at Alfresco not only helps you save content to ECM server, but also provides the ability to select multiple documents and attach them as links to outgoing emails; several widgets give you ease-of-use in Alfresco space selection and repository navigation. Visit the gallery page to download it.

Get your intent across.
With the new Babelfish Translator & Dictionary Zimlets:



Check them out in the source, they’re coming to your server’s “zimlets-extra” folder shortly - you can even use them in Zimbra Desktop.



 
Auto-Complete & Refined Search

Available in the main branch of perforce are com_zimbra_searchauto & searchrefine. While an updated Yahoo! search Zimlet displays results in a ZmApp tab instead of requiring you to open another browser window.

 

 

 

 

Last year we brought shared mail folders into play to join the rest of the sharing possibilities ZCS offers, but we don’t want to overlook mentioning another feature in 5.0 that has some excellent use cases.

Let’s say you need to collaborate with an assistant (who of course manages everything for you). While sharing is recursive to sub-folders by default, depending on account structure it can mean several invites and checks to make sure everyone is seeing the proper info. Other cavets include the occasional inability for the sharee to mentally organize / conceptually visualize the sharer’s folder structure scheme, or the possible need to keep the permissions and mountpoints updated when content is moved a lot. Nothing stings like missing important information when someone shifts material into folders that aren’t actually shared according to plan; everyone can become instantly out-of-sync.

Admins know that sharing the entirety of an account can be achieved through modifyFolderGrant & createMountpoint requests. This process previously had a few downsides, like avoiding name conflicts when trying to mount the root of the account ‘all at once’ (fixed in ZCS 5.0.6+).

There are a few RFE’s in the works, such as the ability to share an entire mailbox in one click or to expose custom share roles end-user side. We’re also planning to bring clarity to your web of shares through a single-user share management UI followed by the larger share management and discovery and a new Zimlet as well, but there’s one other cool trick that’s here right now: Family Mailboxes

Don’t let the name deceive you - we’ve used the concept of parent/child relationships, yet this principle can easily apply to any primary/secondary setup such as boss/secretary, professor/assistants, or manager/co-worker/peers; where sharing of passwords is inappropriate or you don’t want another browser session open, yet you still need full control. (Wildcard sub-domains aren’t for everyone, and an additional browser can equal a bit more memory used.)

To get started via CLI (if you’re an end-user ask your admin about configuring it):
zmprov ga secondary@domain.com | grep zimbraId
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

We also want the secondary account visible in the accordion UI of the primary:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraPrefChildVisibleAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

(The primary user can also set this later from their AJAX client preferences tab.)
 
Just like how the Zimbra Desktop’s UI works, you now have access to mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, notebooks, briefcase items, and even preferences of the secondary account:



A few notes:

• As shown above - when replying from an account that’s not yours, emails include a header designating who it was really sent by & “on behalf of” is displayed. It’s also shown as unread in the sent folder of the account owner so they’re made aware of it.
• This is a little different than permissions & mountpoints - so you’ll have to use normal shares if you need access in other end-clients; it requires the AJAX interface for functionality, and currently isn’t available in the HTML web-client.
• Don’t go overboard on visible secondary accounts, our share model covers almost every situation; but as many organizations have a few crucial duos or teams who need to be on the same page every moment - this is there for those who have no time to mess with share permissions and need to manage other users, or perhaps desire complete control in a hosted family account.

To remove, simply replace the plus sign with a minus:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com -zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}

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Have other ideas to improve work flow or make Zimbra family friendly? (Like parental mail screening, the ability for end-users to provision in HSP situations, or even admin console settings?) Then let us know below or drop in over at the community forums.

A year an a half ago the (tiny) Yahoo! Calendar team embarked on a mission to build a new Calendar. We were interested in cracking the consumer market where huge potential for growth and innovation lay. The problem was that the 10 year old platform was falling apart and being held together by bungee cord and tape. Innovation on this platform would have been very challenging and forever handicap our efforts going forward.

Zimbra came into the Yahoo! fold and along with it a huge opportunity (large short-term technical challenges as well!) Zimbra’s underlying technology is ripe for customization, and the Yahoo! Calendar Team dove in and came up with some fantastic results.

The all new Yahoo! Calendar Beta is running an a Zimbra back-end which has been embedded into the Yahoo! architecture, with a brand-spanking new front-end composed of JSP enhancements, a new taglib, YUI, and of course AJAX.

 

This is an early beta product where we focused on getting the fundamentals right first. In coming releases expect to see some exciting enhancements. Our Flickr integration is a hint at where we are taking calendaring; its functionality exposes the power of calendars to be a window to discovering interesting events and content, as well as a window to the past.

      

The teams working together from one code repository was an awesome experience, and this cooperation will continue to bring much more innovation across the Yahoo! network. Lots of great calendar code and ideas have come out of this collaboration, look for some in upcoming ZCS releases or check some out in the main branch in perforce.

How can you get on board early? Just visit: switch.calendar.yahoo.com

Checkout some screencasts of the new calendar in action is here, and a video of Scott Dietzen discussing it on All things Digital.

What else are we up to? John Holder is playing host for CalConnect Roundtable XIII this week at one of Yahoo!’s campuses in Santa Carla, CA - we’re collaborating with some big corporations including Sun, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, Kerio, as well as some major university’s to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

 

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Herbert Wang is a Product Manager on the Zimbra-Yahoo! Calendaring Team.

One of the more nifty features to grace the Zimbra scene recently is the interoperability framework for sharing two-way free/busy information with other server platforms.

Since we released the framework APIs and the reference implementation against Microsoft’s Exchange 2003 (previously covered) there has been a lot of interest from customers and community (interop works with both Open Source and Network Edition).

Argonne National Labs has given excellent feedback culminating in a few enhancements for ZCS 5.0.10. We also recently got a wonderful thank you note from the University of Pennsylvania, who teamed up with the folks over at Sumatra Development to handle some calendar migrations. They were impressed at how well their multi-domain environment behaved, and shared a link to a configuration tip for Exchange 2007. It’s great to see the community enhance, extend, and tweak the open source interop framework.

That type of integration cohesiveness frequently makes Zimbra relevant to organizations in the same way that other open source business application are: often initially at the division level, and then spreading within the enterprise. (Penn breaks their IT into “local support providers” to better serve each school’s specialized needs.) For immense corporations wanting to switch from software such as Exchange, Lotus, Meeting Maker, or other third-parties that interact with our API, picking a new platform can be a massive undertaking - having interop can mean a safe departmental decision.

Admins out there can certainly attest the the headaches involved with maintaining different server infrastructures, but it also works in reverse - that ’stubborn group’ which doesn’t want to switch or the ‘peer organization running different software’ can now seamlessly communicate as one.

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.

Hey, did you hear that Google released a browser? Yeah, and it’s very cool! We might have been a bit early to call Safari the Browser war winner. Based on WebKit (KHTML), this rendering framework (that Chrome uses) has really stormed the market. If you asked us five months ago who was winning the browser war, we would easily say Firefox, with Safari as a close second. With the introduction of Chrome, a new war has started.

At the start of this century, the war was about “Open-ness” and who could be more open and win the hearts of users. Now it’s a war of speed, and who’s faster. A few blogs and articles have been written, with Mozilla and Google both claiming their JS engine is faster. So who’s right? Both are faster than IE (6, 7, and 8), but in our opinion, what matters is how responsive web applications are. So who will win Zimbra’s Speed trophy?

Zimbra has a testing harness thats in alpha which we will be making available to the public in the future, that measures performance on different actions within Zimbra. This helps us understand what the end user is seeing. People can talk V8 Benchmark, Dromaeo, SunSpider, or what ever they want. What really matters is how applications perform. Our tests are pure UI performance, ie, how fast Zimbra is to the end user.

Considering that one of Zimbra’s strengths is our AJAX web interface, we decided to put Chrome to the test, along with IE, FireFox, and Safari. The control system was: Intel Core2 duo, 2.39Ghz 1.99GB RAM Windows XP

Here’s how it did (lower is faster):

Overall Performance

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All Tests

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Given that Chrome is built on WebKit, this didn’t come as any particularly huge surprise. In our previous tests, Safari came out the fastest renderer of the Zimbra Web Client. In our tests, Chrome came in as a very close second, and we expect it to get faster.

We want Chrome to work as good as FireFox or Internet Explorer. So, if you find an issue, please report it in the bug report below.

Want more info on the browser war? Check out these links:

Who won the browser war? - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/and-the-winner-is.html
Safari vs Safari- http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/browser-war-part-3-safari-311-nightlies.html
IE vs IE - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/browser-war-part-2-ie7-vs-ie8b.html
FF vs FF - http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/05/round-1-ff2-vs-ff3rc1.html
Support Opera for Zimbra Web Client - http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5932
Hack the Zimbra Web Client to Support Chrome - http://www.zimbra.com/forums/users/21903-googles-chrome-browser.html

This week, Zimbra held a Zimbra Administration Course at the Yahoo! headquarters in Santa Clara. For those who don’t know, the administration course covers just about everything in Zimbra from A to Z. (more…)

With Zimbra 5.0 we’ve introduced some newer ways to make the user experience faster with the Zimbra Web Client. We’ve talked about Jetty, YUI compression, and Lazy Loading, but now there’s just one burning question: Which browser is fastest? (more…)

Firefox 2 took on FF3RC1, Internet Explorer 7 took on IE8b, so who’s duking it out in round 3? Safari 3.1.1 vs SF nightlies. (more…)

Round 1 covered Firefox 2 vs 3RC1 and the results were much easier to predict and extrapolate, but it wasn’t the same for Internet Explorer 7 vs 8b. In the heavy weight division IE7 is often compared to a 500-pound gorilla, but could Microsoft convince it to go on a diet for IE8? (more…)