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.

---

For more screen caps and the download check out the Zimbra Gallery.

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

Next post… Ignoring Conversations.