New with Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0 is the ability to create Zimlets that show-up as tab applications in the Zimbra Web Client.  This powerful new feature, unique to the Zimbra platform, enables partners & customers to more easily integrate third-party applications with the Zimbra Web Client. And there are already new Zimlets taking advantage of this feature, like the Social Zimlet or the BroadSoft Zimlet. Let’s take a look at how to implement some of the basic operations of this new feature…But first, some background: the Zimbra Web Client displays multiple default applications across the top of the interface as "tabs". These applications include (based on your deployment configuration):… Read more »

When developing a Zimlet, you are constantly making code changes and then packaging and deploying the Zimlet to be able to test those changes. This is the Zimlet development process and is done over & over again until your Zimlet is "ready" for production. An iterative development process like this that involves packaging and deploying with each code change can be quite time consuming and really impact your developer productivity. That’s where the Zimlet Development Directory comes in. By using the Zimlet Development Directory, you can develop your Zimlets without having to package and deploy the Zimlet with each code change. You can make your code changes directly in the Zimlet files and just refresh your browser to see the changes take affect. This will greatly reduce your development time and overall, make it much easier to build Zimlets.… Read more »

This is one people have asked about a lot. Starting with Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, we will be providing a formal Zimlet Developer’s Guide and API Reference. The goal of this documentation is to make it easier for partners and customers to build Zimlets and to integrate with the Zimbra platform. As we’ve built this documentation, here are some of our guiding principles: Easy to find. Make the documentation online and "wiki-based" for easy access. Reduce "wondering" between versions.… Read more »

Many of our partners, customers, administrators and end users have seen the Microsoft announcement regarding a roadmap to document the Outlook Personal Storage Table (.pst) file format, and have expressed their curiosity about it’s impact on Zimbra products. While it is still unknown if documentation will provide enough insight on how to really unlock the Outlook PST, we see it as the first step in providing new functionality in future versions of Zimbra Collaboration Suite and Zimbra Desktop that access the terabytes of data in PSTs. For more than a decade, many attempts have been made to understand the Outlook file format, and products have struggled to provide PST support on platforms other than Windows. All efforts have come up short for one reason or another. As Paul Lorimer mentions in his blog post: MAPI and OOM libraries have been available to access PST content, but those libraries are available only to Microsoft programs where Outlook is installed. This dependency forces customers contemplating an OS or platform switch to include email data portability as factor in their decision.… Read more »