Zimbra

In part three of this series, we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bruce has been an esteemed advocate for Zimbra since the campus switched over to our offerings two years ago. If you recall, we highlighted some of UWM’s creations in our original post, including their White Pages, Availability, Help Tool, and Subscription Center Zimlets. We recently caught up with them to get the low down on Zimbra happenings across campus.

Read more from our Q&A with Bruce below:

How many people are using Zimbra on campus?
Approximately 50,000 users since last summer. Practically every department had a different setup. We recently had our fourth Microsoft Exchange migration, this time with University Police, and they are already productively utilizing Zimbra as their email and calendaring tool. We also had three Groupwise environments migrate, and they had very few issues after conversion.

What’s your favorite thing about Zimbra?
Given the state of the economy and our budget, the favorite thing for me is that I am able to deploy services for mail and calendar for 50k accounts with under three full time employees total, all staffing included. The system administrators who formally supported distributed Exchange and Groupwise environments have now been able to focus on higher value added services for our faculty.

What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve gotten since deployment?
That’s easy. The calendar has been a strong focus since the start, and our end-users really appreciate that we now have a fully enterprise calendar linking faculty, staff, and students in one integrated environment. We have connected the calendar with our other sources, such as our course management tool, student system, and tutoring/mentoring scheduler; everyone has responded very favorably to each new feature.

Have any institutional issues been solved or mitigated since introducing Zimlets?
We have a big test ahead of us this fall with the debut of our Subscription Center Zimlet. We expect it to have a positive impact on student retention through the ability to better organize all aspects of the lives of new students from the first day they show up on campus. I can’t wait to see the results.

In our first post of the series, we highlighted a few of the recent creations coming out of Wayne State University – their Broadcast, AccessID, and Anti-Phishing Zimlets. Given the unique customization abilities, there are many reasons and motives behind every Zimlet’s conception. So, we decided to check in with Systems Analyst Rob Thompson, to provide some context behind their latest extensions.

Highlights from our Q&A with Rob are below:

How long have you been running Zimbra?
The university started evaluating mail systems in earnest during the 1st quarter of 2008. We went full production for all of our 70,000 users in June 2009.

What’s your favorite Zimlet and why?
One of the most popular is our AccessID Zimlet. Our previous email system did not have an extensible API that would allow us to integrate our directory information into email content. Zimbra’s ability to create context-sensitive events allows our users to mouse-over an internal WSU ID number (which are quite cryptic) and instantly retrieve a name, department, phone, email address, and other data from our directory about the referenced user.

Were there any campus issues in particular that inspired you to leverage mashups?
Integration with student content applications and existing frameworks are where we are seeing the most demand, and thus where we are focusing our development. This includes L-Soft Listserv, a home-grown announcement service, class schedule information and more. Since going live, we have had a steady stream of requests to leverage external systems into the Zimbra user interface. Many of these projects are already well underway.

What are students and/or faculty saying about your Zimlets?
Since we’re very early on in our rollout, every compliment seems to come with another request for more integration work! In the past we have had to turn these requests down, as they were simply not possible with the software at hand. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us, and are very excited to have the opportunity to accomplish them with Zimbra.

   

It’s September, which signals the time students will be returning to school. At Zimbra, this means continuing our work with the more than 500 institutions that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. We are thrilled to help educators and students alike with their communication needs in over 33 countries, including institutions such as Kansas State, Texas A & M, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.

With “back-to-school” in the air, we thought it was an appropriate time to check in on some of our education customers. Turns out, Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, compatibility with other email clients and campus systems, open technologies, easy branding, administrator-friendly architecture, in both hosted and on-premise deployment options aren’t the only reasons why Zimbra continues to be the #1 choice for education. Today, schools are growing contributors to our highly regarded Zimlet program. With customized mash-ups, more and more educational institutions at all levels are taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source roots and community, by easily integrating ZCS with other online tools that students and faculty interact with daily.

A few universities have recently shared with us some examples of useful implementations:

Wayne State University
Message Authenticity Zimlet: Helps the student confirm the authenticity of a message sent by Wayne administration. Users may choose alternative delivery methods and rate the message’s importance relevance to them in order to provide feedback for future news updates.
AccessID Zimlet: This hover-over Zimlet provides users with a quick look into the university directory, making sense of arcane user ID codes.
Anti-Phishing Zimlet: Beyond just marking something as spam, this Zimlet allows users to report an email as a serious phishing attempt into an automatic tickiting system, so that Wayne administrators can research if other users have inadvertently provided personal information when they shouldn’t, and then report back to the campus about any complaint to be aware of.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Subscription Center Zimlet: This Zimlet acts as the single source for consolidated public calendar information enabling users to search, browse, and subscribe to assorted campus and community calendars.
White Pages Zimlet: This Zimlet integrates an existing directory server to provide various phone number, office location, and home address information of students, faculty, and staff, based on their existing privacy settings.
Help Zimlet: Gives users quick access to custom tailored documentation for the campus community as well as video screencasts demonstrating how to use and configure various features of the Zimbra web interface.

Simon Fraser University
Course Resources/mySFU Zimlet: Content put out by professors for a specific class, and also connects to details on course books, library records, campus news, and more.
Tips & Tricks Zimlet: A customized interface with a daily tidbit of useful info for getting the most out of the Zimbra experience as well as computing accross campus.
Broadcast Alert Zimlet: Gets the word out to anyone with Zimbra currently open or upon next login. With students on the system so often to get work done, it’s a great way to send a critical notice.

Stay tuned and we will continue the series with additional screenshots plus more in depth Q&A with a few Zimbra educational customers.

For the last post in the Power Zimlet Series (Attach Email, Ignore Conversations, Contact Organizer, Task Reminders), we are ending on a lighter note.

Zimlet 5: Emoticons in Email

Who doesn’t love emoticons? They are core part of life online and I admit am a huge fan of them.

Historically Zimbra has always supported emoticons – but only in IM.   For ZCS 6.0 (coming very soon) we have made some enhancements to the Zimlet platform (including the ability to create new ‘application tabs’) that enable us to now support emoticons in email compose as well.

When you write an email you can simply enter your standard text emoticon [example: :)  ], or now you can select an emoticon visually using a button in the compose window that will insert the text for you (see below).  When you receive an email, emoticon text is automatically displayed as an image.

Now, emoticons are great but occasionally you might not want to see emoticons in your email, may be because some code or some text that’s unintentionally matching emoticons. So, we have added “Temporarily Disable in Mail” to help disable emoticons. Right click on the Zimlet in the left pane, and select it, then reopen the email. Further, Double click on Zimlet in the over-view panel to permanently enable/disable it.

Enjoy!

PS: This will be shipped as a default Zimlet in ZCS 6.0.

In the last 3 posts in the Power Zimlet series we covered tools for improving email and contacts: contact organizer, ignoring conversations and attaching emails to messages.  Today we are turning to a new application in ZCS that many, including myself, find incredibly useful – Tasks.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite has had the Tasks application for some time now, but as of yet it doesn’t support reminders.  And without reminders it is hard to keep track of Tasks at hand, making it sometimes hard to use.  This new Zimlet fills that gap by providing a reminder digest once a day.

Zimlet 4: Tasks Reminders

How the Zimlet works:
Once a day (when you first login), this Zimlet searches for your Tasks (and shared Tasks) and displays a list of all Tasks that are overdue, in-progress, etc. This list is shown only for Tasks that are due 2-weeks (14 days) from today and continues to show for 2-weeks post due-date. This date range is user configurable.

Additional Features:
- It also has a “Send Email” Feature, which helps in follow up of tasks. For example: You might want to send mail to someone asking why they are lagging behind their tasks, etc.
- You can click on the Zimlet and press “Show Again” to see the Reminder dialogs again anytime.

Below is a picture of the Tasks Reminder dialog that appears (sorted by date urgency).

As usual, you can get this and learn more in the Zimbra Gallery.

Up next: Emoticons in Email

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

As a long-time Zimbra developer and employee, I’ve spent countless hours each week using Zimbra email.  I love the overall experience, especially because I have been able to tailor it to my personal style using Zimlets.  They are easy to create and over time I have built quite a few.  So without further ado, the following is the first of a 5 post series featuring new Zimlets which I think are incredibly useful and empower Zimbra users.

Zimlet 1: Attach Emails

Every so often I miss the ability to easily to attach an earlier email while composing an new email message.  This Zimlet does just that, it adds an “Attach Email” tab in the Attachments dialog in Mail Compose. Once you click on the Email tab you can search for emails that you want to attach or just scroll the list. You can even ‘browse’ for emails by clicking on the folder tree.  Finally, something I really like is with any of these methods you can also select multiple emails and attach them simultaneously.

Here is how it works… assume you are composing or replying to an email and now you want to attach some earlier email…

1. Click on the Add Attachment Button

2. Click on the Attach Mail tab

3. Search or browse for emails (in this case below I’m looking in the Sent folder)

4. Select the email(s) you want to attach – ctrl to select multiple.

5. Click Attach button

You can repeat these steps again if you want for more emails or other attachment types.

Note – you need ZCS 5.0.15 and above or 6.x to use this Zimlet.

Next post… Ignoring Conversations.

Zimbra’s open source roots have always been of great importance to both the company and the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).  When we set out to build a new collaboration system over five years ago, we wanted to bring a fresh perspective to the market, and a big part of that was our commitment to being open source.  We understood sharing ideas within the open source community keeps you a one step ahead of competitors by iterating faster to give users what they want.  A great example demonstrating how the community has flourished is the Zimlet development program.

Zimlets are simple but powerful extensions of ZCS that connect users’ email, calendar, and contacts with any number of outside services (for a couple of recent examples see Alfresco and Peru and TripIt).  Zimlet development growth in the community has been strong and steady, and we are excited to continue supporting the community’s work by providing a place where developers can feature the best of their integrations to share with other Zimbra users.   So, today we are launching an updated Zimlet Gallery where you can pick and choose from many handy new ZCS extensions.

At the same time, we also love seeing our Yahoo! friends continue to embrace openness as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. In addition to this announcement today, a number of our Yahoo! brethren are extending their platforms to become more open. Today, Yahoo! Mail is introducing applications which enable people to make online payments, access personal photos and more easily send large files directly from their inbox. In addition, My Yahoo! is adding even more third-party applications, driving enhanced personal productivity for users directly from their My Yahoo! start page. You can read more about the Mail and My Yahoo! updates on the Yodel and YDN blogs.

As part of the Zimlet Gallery launch today, we’d like to introduce you to a few new third-party Zimlets, including:

Xythos Zimlet – The Xythos Zimlet allows you to drag and drop email messages and file attachments directly into Xythos’ Enterprise Document Management System.  Secure document management is popular in the enterprise and universities; integration in email is key for ubiquitous adoption.

Processmaker Zimlet – The Processmaker Zimlet helps streamline workflows, like time-off requests, all within Zimbra email (see above).  This Zimlet is already becoming popular and is being deployed at Access America Transport and Ministerio de Vivienda by our Zimbra Partners.

In addition, Zimbra developers have created a handful of new Zimlets, including:

Place Sticky Notes on Email – The new Sticky Notes Zimlet allows you to attach and tag emails with “notes.” One can leave comments, reminders, additional info about the email and more. And Zimbra’s powerful search can search through emails based on the contents of the tags/notes attached to the email.

Email Highlighter – The Colored Emails Zimlet allows you to apply personally assigned colors to emails from specific senders such as a family member, your boss, etc. You can identify senders by color, but you can also create colored emails through tags, making it easier to prioritize any inbox.

Save Email as Documents – With one click, the Email-2-Doc Zimlet lets you save an important email as a Zimbra Document; it will automatically save any attachments as links in the Document as well. The email can then be edited and shared with others.