Ajax hype is in full swing. Ajax may be the most promising “new” UI technology since HTML (Ajax programming report card discusses why), but there are now discussions of whether and when Ajax is going to displace Windows and Office. Over the top I think.

At the same time, there is a very compelling case to look to Ajax for Internet services, ASPs, B2C and B2B applications, and especially Email/messaging and collaboration (see below).

How do we identify the sweet and not-so-sweet spots for Ajax?

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For a term that was only coined early in 05 (Thanks Mr. Garrett—perhaps like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, we had no idea how we were going to describe the new Web UI we started two years ago), Ajax clearly rates an A in terms of generating buzz. The fair question now is to what degree the reality can live up to the hype.

After looking at the Zimbra Ajax client, Paul Ambrose (one of the WebLogic founders and a good friend) said “There is a special place in heaven reserved for whoever had the patience to get all the Javascript programming right.” On the mark I think. Building rich UI in Ajax today is simply too hard. For the systems programming teams of the leading web properties (e.g., Google, Yahoo!) and platform software companies (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, and little Zimbra), it is in reach now. But if we in the industry want to see Ajax follow in the footsteps of other Web UI technologies (PHP, ASP, JSP, and so on), we still have a lot of work to do.

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We just pushed some new Screenshots of the Admin UI.

The calendar team has been heads down since the last release and the results are pretty sweet. Here are some screen shots and a taste of what you’ll see when you grab the next release.

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Why did we not use Cyrus IMAP and what’s this business of AJAX and SOAP … Roland talks about our our server architecture here
and about our SOAP here.

AJAX is such a buzz word now … and many ask us how we decided upon AJAX and how we ended up at the right place/right time with the right app. Well, in Dec 2003, about 9 months before Jesse James Garrett coined the word AJAX my co-founders Ross Dargahi and Roland Schemers surprised me one fine Monday with two things they had hacked up during the many weekends prior … first a really rich and fast mail app that was running inside the browser and talking XML to the backend ….and second a way to associate XML data sources to words inside email (now known as mail mashups or Zimlets as it will be known soon) – this was the genesis of the popular Google maps demo that was shown at Web2.0. Talking of Ross and Roland …. these two guys were server side programmers until we started Zimbra. They were among the best server side programmers I have met in my life …. and in my stint at Javasoft I met some great programmers. But what amazes me is the ease with which these two dudes started hacking Javascript, CSS and HTML … which included doing the initial prototype that landed us funding from some great investors … and btw they also did all of the initial visual design/graphics arts for the first year.

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David Ferris of Ferris Research posted an entry titled: Urgent: Find a Solution to Top-of-Inbox Task Prioritization.
Below are a few ways in which Zimbra can make working with email a more productive experience.

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Scott will be in Boston next week talking on: The Future of Enterprise Email

Some of you may already know about this but for those who don’t or forgot. After setting up your mail server you should run a mail relay test. This will run several tests against your MTA and verify it’s properly configured. By default Zimbra ships postfix such that it’s not a relay. However any custom config may open your server up for abuse. Always better to check before a spammer finds you!