It's easy to talk about how new communication channels will marginalize email – even in the business world. Yet simply checking your inbox on a Monday morning, it's obvious that email is not dead and plays and important role in communication. Osterman Research recently published a survey of corporate email users on their use of email. The results show that email is still a critical part of the work environment for many people. We’re not cutting back on email at work Despite social media channels and other means of communications, we still rely on email at work.  90 percent of the survey respondents use email as much or more today than a year ago:   Source:… Read more »

One of the major changes coming up in a future version of Zimbra is a rethinking of the offline experience – how do you use Zimbra when you're not connected to a network, or when your connection cuts in and out during the day? As we all become more mobile, this is an important concern. Today, Zimbra Desktop is the way to use Zimbra when offline – and it's done a good job at providing consistency between the online and offline experience. But we think we can deliver a faster, smoother and more efficient offline experience by re-architecting Zimbra Desktop from the ground up. This change describes the work that we are doing for supporting the offline experience – to be available in a future version of Zimbra. On a side note: Nothing discussed here affects third-party client support – such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book and standards-based clients (POP, IMAP, iCal, CalDAV, etc.) Background The concept behind the Zimbra Desktop was to create a consistent experience whether you're offline or online.… Read more »

VMware Zimbra is the only enterprise cloud email solution based on open source standards that is now available as-a-service to US federal, state and local government organizations through GSA contracts. Watch the on demand webinar as we discuss how Zimbra is uniquely built for the highest security environments and is ideal for government organizations with our special guest from General Dynamics IT. VMware Zimbra supports two-way SSL Smartcard authentication, including support for Department of Defense (DoD), Common Access Cards (CAC), and S/MIME encryption, ensuring messages can only be read by the intended recipient. IT admins also have full control of their deployments through an easy-to-use browser-based admin console, further ensuring data and device security. The on demand 45-minute webinar will include: Challenges and requirements of the Government Sector Special guest GDIT on why the Zimbra Cloud is ideal for Government Organizations A live demo of Zimbra's email and collaboration solution View Webinar Now… Read more »

Deutsche Schule Tokyo Yokohama (DSTY) is the oldest German school in East Asia, founded in 1904. The school offers education from Kindergarten to High School for German-speaking students in the Tokyo area. Communication between the school's 63 faculty and staff members, as well as with students – enabled by Zimbra – proves to be a key capability for the school's normal daily operation, as well as during one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit Japan. The Challenge Prior to Zimbra, DSTY used another Windows-based e-mail system, which provided messaging ability, and some basic calendar functionality, but it did not have any sharing capability between the two, and did not offer a shared repository for data such as Zimbra Briefcase. “One of the challenges we had was sharing calendars for booking rooms, and finding out when people are available,” recalls John Munro, IT Administrator at DSTY. “We set up a shared calendar resource through Microsoft Outlook with a third-party solution. It was not built into the messaging, and required manual installation on each client and a lot of attention.” “The system was not reliable, and was not always available” he adds.… Read more »

Utah's first ISP, XMission has grown into a leading provider of hosted services to customers in Utah and around the globe. Today, XMission offers Unified Email & Collaboration, a secure, hosted communication service built on VMWare Zimbra Collaboration Suite, that provides email, remote storage, calendaring, collaboration, and task management, all in one economical solution. The Challenge As a hosting provider, XMission started out offering email-only solutions to customers. The company soon realized this was not sufficient. XMission's email customers were managing third-party applications for contacts, and maintaining separate calendaring applications, and they had to support each of these applications themselves. XMission saw those customers really needed a whole communications suite, rather than having to maintain multiple, siloed tools. “We try to be proactive on the services that we offer, and we realized email alone is simply not enough,” explains John Webster, XMission VP of Business Development and Zimbra Product Manager.… Read more »

On Friday, February 22nd VMware hosted the 3rd Annual VMware Zimbra Service Provider Summit in San Francisco, CA. This event brought together our largest Zimbra Service Provider customers from around the world, with the goals of sharing our future vision of the Zimbra platform, fostering discussions on the opportunities and challenges facing carriers today and sharing with one another the best practices and learnings from real world deployments. This year's summit was our largest one ever and included 61 attendees from 14 different carriers and partners from around the Globe.  Our partners heard from the Zimbra leadership on their plans around evolving Zimbra to support their "always on" environments in a non-disruptive manner, as well as providing an optimized messaging experience for mobile devices, tablets, PCs and the Web. Zimbra's culture is rooted in openness and transparency - from our Open Source Edition of Zimbra, to our public forums with over 50,000 Members and finally to our strong Developer Community that has contributed hundreds of extensions to our Zimlet gallery. We believe this transparency and openness benefits each of our carrier partners and their email and collaboration offerings. Their real-world learnings greatly contribute to the quality of our product and our continued partnership will continue to make the Zimbra product better.  Whether you are a mobile carrier in Japan or the biggest cable operator in the US, operating a messaging platform used by millions of subscribers in a 24x7 environment while continuing to innovate and delight subscribers with the best in class messaging experience is critical to success.… Read more »