VMworld is just around the corner, and not only is it VMware’s most important event of the year, it’s also shaping up to be big for Zimbra too. We will be exhibiting with our new organization for the first time, showing off the new Zimbra Appliance and talking a lot more about the future of Zimbra and VMware together.
On the later point, we also want to provide an opportunity for attendees and customers in the general vicinity to hear about the Zimbra roadmap and provide us directional feedback away from the bustle of the show floor. As such we are having an Advisory Meeting and breakfast on Wednesday September 1st. The meeting is offsite at the W Hotel, so both show attendees and non-attendees are welcome.
Topics will include ZCS 7.0 features, Zimbra Appliance and Zimbra Desktop plus a round table discussion with the Zimbra product leadership team.
Date: Wednesday September 1, 2010
Time: 8am – 10am
Location: W Hotel, San Francisco
Space is limited and breakfast will be served, please RSVP to confirm your space and room location to: events@zimbra.com.
Also – for those planning on attending VMworld please remember the Tech Exchange where you can learn about Zimbra APIs, building Zimlets and more from the Zimbra product and development teams.
Please note if you cannot make the Advisory this time we will continue to host more in the future at major events!
Zimbra Desktop 2.0 Beta 4 has just been released. Zimbra Desktop is a free and open source email client application that gives you on- and off-line access to all your email accounts in one place. Whether you use Zimbra, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra Desktop greatly simplifies your inbox experience.
A detailed list of ZD 2.0 enhancements is available at the Zimbra Product Portal. If you are coming from an earlier ZD 2.0 Beta, one of the bigger differences you’ll notice is Zimlet support. We’ve included Zimlets like Email Reminder and everyone’s favorite Social. And you can install additional ZD compatible Zimlets via the Preferences area.
Download links are provided below. Please comment, submit feedback and questions via the Community Forums, or make use of Bugzilla to file confirmed bugs and request enhancements.
Posted in Community, News by Zimbra Team on August 3rd, 2010
We’re excited to be part of our first VMworld, where we’ll take center stage to showcase Zimbra products.
August 30-September 2 at Moscone Center, San Francisco
October 12-14, Bella Center, Copenhagen
VMworld is a great chance to keep up on the latest technology trends, with over 300 different breakout sessions and labs on topics like leveraging the cloud, virtualizing enterprise applications and managing the desktop as a service. It is also a great opportunity to meet with knowledge experts or join group discussions with peers and industry experts. And, you’ll hear presentations from VMware leaders along with outside guest speakers. Plus you won’t want to miss the band. Last year was Foreigner, can you guess who it is this time? (Hints: + 30 million records; 7 top Billboard hits).
Below is a list of the Zimbra activities that we have planned. If you have not already signed-up and you would like to attend this year’s event, click on any of the links below to get to the registration pages. We hope that you can join us at VMworld 2010! Sessions
Breakout Speakers:
“Lessons from the Cloud: How Application Clouds Are Evolving to Meet New End User, Administrator and Datacenter Trends” – John Robb PC8326
“Zimbra and The Future for Mission Critical Apps in the Virtualized Enterprise” – Jon Dybik EA8210
Have you ever found yourself scrambling to find a WebEx meeting invite minutes before the meeting is set to begin? Or if you are scheduling a meeting, you are constantly switching between WebEx and your calendar to create the meeting & calendar invite?
Well, those days are gone with the new WebEx Zimlet. The WebEx Zimlet now brings the power of WebEx right into your Zimbra calendar. To see the WebEx Zimlet in action, checkout this video.
Create WebEx meeting just like you would create a regular meeting.
Typically you would switch between Zimbra and WebEx to create a meeting. With the WebEx Zimlet, when creating your appointment in Zimbra, simply press the “Save as WebEx” button to create a WebEx meeting. The Zimlet automatically selects the configured WebEx account to be use (see below for information on multiple WebEx account setup), creates a WebEx meeting, inserts all the WebEx details (WebEx url, phone, passcode, etc) into the appointment body and saves the meeting.
Create a Quick meeting.
Allows users to quickly invite people and create a WebEx meeting.
Start or Join an existing meeting.
You do not have to scramble to find that WebEx invite or goto the WebEx site to find a meeting. You can view a list of meetings on your Webex Calendar and Start (as a host) or Join (as an attendee).
Manage multiple WebEx accounts.
You can store up to 5 WebEx accounts (with related conference calling information). This is especially useful if you are managing multiple shared calendars. For example, if you create a WebEx meeting in the CEO Calendar, the Zimlet will automatically uses CEO WebEx account information.
Full support for recurring meetings.
The WebEx Zimlet supports all of the WebEx recurring types and end-by patterns. Therefore, you can create virtually any kind of recurring meetings in Zimbra and the WebEx Zimlet creates an exact replica on WebEx.
Automatic time-zone configuration.
The WebEx Zimlet maps the 82 supported Zimbra time zones to the WebEx 61 time zones. This allows users to select a time zone and leave the setup of the WebEx meeting to the Zimlet.
Add meeting and tele-conference information to Subject/Location fields.
Lot of times its useful to just put the WebEx meeting and conference information in the location field itself. The WebEx Zimlet has a preference to select what you want to be appended and Zimlet automatically inserts the information.
As you can see, the WebEx Zimlet provides an awesome integration between Zimbra and WebEx. And will greatly simply your day-to-day online meetings.
Note: due to a technical difficulties, we apologize for the many updates and Tweets to this blog post.
As you may have noticed, we have just posted the recording of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6-to-7 and VMware Overview webinar. This was hugely popular — hundreds of customers, partners and community members attended — because it covered three critical areas of Zimbra’s future:
What’s in ZCS 6.0 (powerful new admin features, Enterprise support and usability improvements) as well as near-term additions (such as support for Android, BES 5.0, BES Express, and Outlook 2010).
The roadmap of ZCS 7.0 and beyond: a fascinating discussion of calendar wizards, powerful distribution lists, workspaces, and IM changes.
The future with VMware: how Zimbra fits within the VMware stack and the value it brings to the Zimbra environment (notably an appliance, vSphere integration for DR, HA and site recovery).
We also received many excellent questions – too many to answer during the live session, so we’ll cover the remaining here:
Q: Zimlets, IMHO, should allow push as well as pull; akin to what IM does at the moment. Realtime phone apps require that capability to allow popups in a client session. A: Real-time push and pull updates are fully supported in the ZWC, Zimlet should be able to do the same.
Q: Is the IM server connection change slated for the Network or Open Source Edition? A: External XMPP proxy/interop it is scheduled for both.
Q: Do you have public calendars for appointments or a conference room? And only certain people can reserve timeframe and all others can view? A: The use case here is akin to a “board room” where only certain people have rights to book the room, but everyone can view the availability of that room. The answer is yes: you can create a public calendar for the conference room as a resource, and then permit only specific users to reserve that resource.
Q: Better quarantining of emails, AS/AV stats. and per user prefs. akin to MailScanner and MailWatch A: Zimbra team is expanding its anti-spamming and anti-virus functionality. Stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, you may want to consider using some postfix capable methods.
Q: Any word on per-user read state on messages? A: The use case here is when multiple users have access to a single account, one user clicking on a message will mark it as read for all other future users. The feature enhancement (individual user state on shared messages) takes significant effort, has not been committed yet, but is discussed thoroughly in bugzilla. If this is a feature you feel is crucial, please vote for it or mention so in a support case.
Q: Would email tracking likely to be a feature that will be added back in; since zmmsgtrace was pulled? A: There is a enhancement request for a tracing replacement, but have not yet released a schedule; stay tuned for more details. If you feel this is a key feature, please comment on its implementation in bugzilla.
Q: Which of the features are targeted @ the FOSS or the Network Edition? A: We generally don’t make final decisions until we approach the release date. Check pm.zimbra.com for specific feature release information, and vote for the features you see as most valuable.
Q: Will Zimbra DR allow realtime replication and from a multi-tenant experience allow geo connection to the most appropriate server ? A: We are going to leverag all of the High Availability and Data Recovery options that are provided by vSphere (and partners). We’re also looking at additional capabilities beyond that using direct server sync – stay tuned.
Q: VMware recommends single processor vms for best performance. Looking forward to easier multi-component zimbra installation or guide. A: The VMware team suggests using the fewest number of virtual cpus required to satisfy the workload. If you need four, you should use four. See the new Zimbra on vSphere Recommendations wiki article for more information.
Q: Will VMware Update Manager take care of the updates? A: Look for future announcements – perhaps for a release sometime in 2011.
Q: With respect to the appliance, would one be allowed to tune SA and CLAMAV? A: By design, there is no CLI or shell in the Zimbra Appliance. It’s built for simplicity of management, so all configuration and administration will be done through a new web-based streamlined UI; likewise if something is not in our current admin console it’s probably not built into the appliance yet either.
Q: Could you expand on the AD / External Auth changes that you will be making? In connection with that, will you be able to deploy Zimbra and have it automatically keep in sync with users in Active Directory? A: For the appliance, there will be a one time bulk import.
Here are the RFE’s: 44835 | 45223 | 45174 Please vote for the features that are important to you.
For ZCS, we are not making any AD/ External Auth changes. Zmexternaldirsync does this today.
Q: Any plans to improve the management console for zimbra network edition, i.e. Monitoring and Status tools? I would like to see the kind of admin tools you’d find with mdaemon or other similar apps. Right now it’s slow and doesn’t provide much visual feedback. A: We’re working with Hyperic for additional monitoring and reporting capabilities. We have not released a schedule yet, more details soon.
Q: Are there firm time lines on 32 bit phaseout? A: The end of 7.0 will be the last time 32-bit is supported, and the dates are not yet finalized. Therefore, it will be quite some time before 32-bit is depreciated. We recommend that you move to 64-bit if you are new to Zimbra or planning an upgrade. See the phase out FAQ for more details.
Q: Will migration from physical 32 bit system to Appliance be built in to appliance? or have migration tool to perform this? A: The zimbra-to-zimbra migration tool is completely independent of the hardware. You should be able to migrate from a 32-bit machine to the appliance without a problem.
Q: There has been a lot of contention on the forums about the priority of particular rfe’s/bugs; now with greater resources would Zimbra look at a different type of voting mechanism? A: If you are having trouble with the current methods or a hitting ’show-stopper’ issue please contact the community mangers to help you. (As always, customers also have the option of directing inquires through support to raise their urgency.) Having said this, we’re always open to new ideas for the community process. If you prefer a specific voting mechanism, we’d like to hear about it – and the 7.0 detailed roadmap will be open soon.
Q: Scaling on VMWare… it’s going to be 2011 before we’ll be able to run mailbox servers on VM with thousands of accounts per mailbox? A: Zimbra already supports thousands of mailboxes in a virtualized environment. The Zimbra Appliance, which will require little-to-no configuration or administration — a “cloud in a box” — is slated for small- to medium-sized businesses.
Q: What about official CentOS support? A: Since one cannot get support at the operating system provider level, our technical staff can’t 100% support it. Having said that, it should perform similarly to RHEL.
Q: Is HSM going to change? A: The Hierarchical Storage Management in the Network Edition doesn’t have any major changes targeted till 8.0 server. (We did add the ability to offload other items besides messages in 6.0 with a search type query.) There are no plans on adding HSM to the Open Source Edition.
Q: Are there plans to allow installation on big iron like HP IA64 ? (RX range) A: Not yet, as there does not appear to be a business case to build and test on big iron. You can file this as a feature enhancement and ask others to vote for it.
Q: How do I find new zimlets? A: We have a renewed Zimlet plugins site with more than 80 contributions. Look for future additions such as a revamp social & IM zimlets, additional salesforce integration, webex changes, smart scheduler and many others: gallery.zimbra.com
Q: ZCS web question: Being able to separate windows from Zimbra is nice for emails. How about having that for all of the other apps (contacts, calendar etc)? A: Yes, this is something we are working on. An example is tabbed calendaring, which is slated for version 7.
Q: Will there be tool to bulk loading documents into Briefcase, especially if supporting collaborating workgroups? A: Yes, there will be a migration tool. And at some point in the future, we’ll have multi-file import in the web-client. If you are looking for convenient file sync today, so far we’ve built-in webDAV support.
Q: Looking forward to whitepapers and wiki for vmware/zimbra. Encourage?. mailto is also a problem for us. A: Whitepapers and wikis are soon to come. Were looking into EWS for Entourage. The Zimbra Desktop does work with mailto links. It is defaulted off (to change it, go to the preferences and select zimbra desktop as the default mailto handler).
With over 55 million commercial Zimbra mailboxes deployed worldwide, and millions more on open source, there are many users reaping the benefits of our next-generation collaboration experience. Many factors contributed to our rapid adoption — such as integrated conversation views, tagging, sharing, powerful search, and mobility — but one of the most important is the ability to customize and extend Zimbra.
To promote extensibility, the Zimbra platform exposes powerful Theme, Data and Zimlet APIs. With these APIs, you can customize everything from branding and interface styles…to integrating external applications & services…to implementing new features. And with a vibrant Community continually using these technologies to enhance Zimbra, the customization you are looking for might already be available.
To that end, we have been busy at work leveraging new resources from our friends at VMware and are pleased to announce the new Zimbra Gallery as the destination for sharing Zimbra product extensions.
The new Gallery includes improved navigation and search capabilities so it is easier than ever to find extensions for Zimbra. The Gallery supports ratings and reviews so Community members can share their feedback and experiences. It is also much easier to share extensions, update status and highlight your work with improved extension “landing pages.”
Please visit the Gallery, download extensions, provide feedback and contribute. We look forward to seeing the library of available extensions in the Zimbra Gallery expand in the weeks and months to come. Enjoy!
In today’s climate IT departments are under a lot of pressure to cut costs yet maintain services that don’t compromise on features. So it’s no surprise we hear more and more the questions, “How does Zimbra total cost-of-ownership (TCO) compare with Microsoft Exchange?” In fact, it recently hit #3 on our popularity chart as organizations contemplate Exchange upgrades again (we’ll save the top two questions for another day).
Public field data typically shows Zimbra Collaboration Suite ahead of MS Exchange Server when licensing and hardware costs are compared for various on-premises deployments. However, while licensing and hardware cost data is readily available, perhaps the most significant recurring cost components in the equation are less well documented — additional time spent administering servers and software and the high cost of support contracts.
This cost differential often gets hazy because most organizations do not closely log time spent on specific tasks, including software administration or escalated user support issues. Instead, in most circles you simply hear something analogous to “my Exchange servers are really cranky.” But how much valuable productivity are you actually losing?
It turns out at EDUCAUSE when we caught up with the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) they shared some great field data with us on this very topic from their own TCO case study.
Exchange
Zimbra
Users
3,100
13,700
FTEs
3.2
2.2
User/FTE
969
6,227
Per User Cost
$7.5
$3
Above: Penn admin resource distribution and resulting monthly per-user costs charged back to departments
According to Adam Preset, an IT Technical Director in Information Systems & Computing (Penn’s central IT organization), Penn’s IT Services added Zimbra 18 months ago to provide departments across the campus a Web 2.0 option in addition to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange 2007 (Zimbra can share Active Directory, resources and free-busy times with Exchange). Today their split-mode deployment consists of 3,100 Exchange users and 13,700 Zimbra users (each with grad students, faculty and employees) running equivalent feature sets (email, calendaring, sharing, mobile, etc).
Split-mode deployments are not uncommon (see Argonne National Labs), but in the case of Penn, the central IT staff’s administration time is closely logged on each system because they charge back time for service rendered to the other departments. Combined with a single team managing both systems simultaneously in split-mode and you have a natural control for cost data.
Adam says they have found Zimbra takes significantly fewer man-hours to administer. In absolute terms Exchange servers take 33% more effort and require one extra full-time headcount per year — even with 4.4 times more users on the Zimbra servers.
Here is a video where Adam discusses their deployment, cost methodology and why more users chose Zimbra over Exchange on campus:
Adam later noted, “to bring the Exchange user base up to Zimbra’s scale and provide the expected level of support we’d need to hire new administrators – probably two or more FTEs, which isn’t practical.”
He also added that common culprits impacting costs in the Microsoft deployment are Outlook client and PST data issues, more support needs on the desktop due to lack of adoption of Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange data restores and more frequent server downtime. Whereas advantages for Zimbra are easier overall server administration and fewer help desk incidents because so many users say they prefer the Zimbra AJAX Web Client over traditional desktop clients.
So what’s the key take-away? Though every organization has different cost sensitivity; data points like this serve as gentle reminders not to forget the whole picture. While a license discount or storage price drop can be helpful for initial TCO calculation, the human capital component is key to understanding real long-term value!
Posted in Community, News by Greg Armanini on March 19th, 2010
By last count, there are roughly 25 current openings in team Zimbra. Better yet we’re looking to add talent across the board: developers (UI, client, server), QA, support, sales, marketing, biz dev, channel, professional services, you name it. So many in fact, it quickly starts to sound like a droning list of names in an Oscars acceptance speech (and rest assured we probably forgot to mention at least one functional role too).
Zimbra partner Nordicmind, recently published a case study on service provider TDC and their hosted business email deployment powered by Zimbra. TDC is a leading telephony, internet, communications, and hosting solutions provider operating in Finland, Norway, and Denmark and specializes in services for businesses; in 2009 it generated $6.6 billion US in revenue with 11.7 million total customers.
It’s great seeing partners like Nordicmind take on these larger, and often more intricate, deployments and yet another indicator of how strong the Zimbra partner ecosystem has become. There are now over 1000 VAR, HSP and distribution partners and many more on the way as our relationship with VMware flourishes.
It’s also worth noting this deployment not only entailed an upgrade to a modern collaboration platform but also a move to VMware ESX at the same time. Zimbra and VMware together offer service providers the optimal blend of advanced features, rapid scalability and redundancy they require to operate mission critical cloud services. More and more we are seeing hosting and service providers leading the charge into virtualization as the benefits become clear.
In fact, in a recent Zimbra Forum poll 38.6% of respondents claimed they are already running Zimbra on VMware which means a lot of organizations are seeing the light!
Read more in the TDC and Nordicmind case study (pdf).
Zimbra partner 
