Zimbra

Tomorrow in Paris, France there is an all day meet-up for Zimbra community members, partners and customers.  The agenda includes Zimbra roadmap beyond ZCS 6 and will have some basics on Zimlet development with drinks to follow.  It looks like a great opportunity to learn a lot and network with others in the community.  There will be both English and French speakers there, be sure to check it out!

From our French friends:

We held the first hands-on Zimlet training over at our London offices back in October, where Raja Rao put together such a great presentation and collection of modules that we decided to roll it into a permanent series.

If your organization is interested in enhancing Zimbra via communication with external services, adding extra functionality via widgets and application portals, or just wants to increase usability of existing inline content: We cordially invite you to our beautiful (and relatively warm) Sunnyvale, California campus February 23-24th. Whether your somewhat new to basic object oriented JavaScript programming or already familiar with advanced Zimbra specific SOAP, JSON requests, and hooks; our front-end engineers and best mashup gurus will be available to help get your coding started.

Details on this two day course’s agenda and the registration form can be found here: Zimbra-Training-Registration-Zimlet-Course.pdf

-For more information contact us or email training@
-Local Hotel options: Zimbra-Training-Location-Sunnyvale.pdf
-There are partner discounts, though any member of the community is welcome to attend even if you aren’t a network edition customer.
-Can’t make it in December? We’re holding another in May tentatively the 4th through 5th. Be sure to let us know early if your interested – space is limited and will fill up fast.

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Find out about other sessions (for admins, helpdesk staff, and even end users) over on the training site.

It’s that time of year again and we are making our way to Denver for the annual EDUCAUSE conference.

We’ve got lots to talk about this year – not only did we cross a huge milestone, reaching 50 million paid mailboxes in less than four years, but we’ve continued to expand our reach in the Edu community (which alone is comprised of millions of paid mailboxes).  New Edu customers this year alone include Eastern Michigan University, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Marietta College, Saint Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Findlay, and Wayne State University.

All of our Edu customers benefit from Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, and many are contributing their own custom mash-ups to make Zimbra’s online tools work for best for them. Institutions like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Simon Fraser University are creating special Zimlets to better serve their students and faculty. You can read more about their specific case studies in our back to school blog series.

Other recent mash-ups include DimDim’s application tab (pictured below), which allow users to access DimDim’s web conferencing services from within Zimbra. Additionally, a new social media Zimlet enables users to read and post tweets to Twitter, or make updates to Facebook and Digg from directly within the ZCS, without having to take the time to visit other websites.

This year we will be joined at the conference by Zimbra customers University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech who will be speaking about how Zimbra has streamlined collaboration across their institutions and discuss how implementing a collaborative email and calendar provider can be extremely cost-effective.

If you are going to be at the conference, don’t forget to check out their panel on Friday, November 6th and please stop by and visit us at booth #332. We will be giving away some great prizes!

One of the best parts of being open source is seeing the ingenuity of our community. This year we’d like to see how you can use Zimbra themes to make your skin crawl this Halloween…

We’ve mocked up two new designs just in time for witching hour, and hope to get these into the gallery soon, but we’d also like to inspire you to put your Zimbra in a costume!

 
Do you prefer the fun of creepy pumkins, spiders, witches, bats, and black cats? Or is the dark brooding theme with a graveyard and crows more spooky? Vote for your favorite here. The Halloween skin with the most votes will be added to our permanent collection by one of our engineers.

 

Rick found an frightening skull that fit the folder tree well, and he’s already coded it into a downloadable theme – to quote one person’s take: “I couldn’t use it for very long without the hairs on the back of my neck tingling, that face is scary.”

 
Don’t forget, there are plenty of other skins that let your Zimbra play dress up all year long… Halloween isn’t the only time of year when it’s ok to pretend to be someone else!

Are you more of a race car driver, a pretty princess, or work in ACU’s and just can’t get enough digital cammo in your email?

Make your Zimbra reflect your mood or keep things interesting with the skin changer Zimlet, which switches themes automatically using whatever frequency preference you set. For even more variety, why not design your own custom theme!

Tell us what other seasonal themes you’d like to see next, even if their half a year away. Prefer a more traditional fall scheme of changing leaves and landscapes? Checkout what others are doing over in the fourms.

Zimbra’s massive user base means our new product releases reach farther than ever before. How far? Consider our 50 million paid mailbox count. With that comes the responsibility to make our solutions exactly what people need when it comes to shaping the future of communication.

So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

 

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3^rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.

 

But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25^th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.

 

We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

 

 

Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs.  “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get the latest version of the Social Zimlet from the Gallery

Thanks again for all your support and feedback; hope you enjoy ZCS 6.0!
Network Edition server download | Open Source Edition server download

 

You can also find a bit more about what’s new in ZCS 6 on the Zimbra website.

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.

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You can get further insight about UWM’s deployment here. Need help with your own concept – or have an design idea for extending Zimbra? Let us know over in the forums.

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.

   

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Stay tuned for part three. To answer some common questions from our first entry: A few of the Zimlets mentioned aren’t available in the gallery, since they are written in a way that interacts with specific back-end systems at each institution. Where possible the authors are working to separate usable code for the broader benefit of all. In the meantime, you can get help with connectors like these and your own ideas over in the community forums.

Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The position will be responsible for developer events, training, documentation and ensuring that developers have all they need to make use of the rich APIs Zimbra offers.

- Our forum with over 27,000 members http://www.zimbra.com/forums/

- Our company/developer blog http://www.zimbrablog.com/

- Our developer and admin wiki http://wiki.zimbra.com/

- Our public bug database http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/

- Our public community driven roadmap http://pm.zimbra.com/

- Our web mash-up extensions (zimlet) gallery http://gallery.zimbra.com/

You can apply directly on the job posting here:

http://careers.yahoo.com/jdescription.php?oid=24060

If you have more questions of have someone in mind who you think would be a good fit please feel free to email me.

KevinH at Zimbra.com

-kevin