One of the great things about being an open source company is that we have a passionate community that goes beyond the boundaries of any one location (Zimbra HQ, for example), with community members that participate and contribute from all over the globe.  We saw this early on with the help the community gave us for international translations,  and several of our early partners hailed from as far as South Africa, Brazil and Germany.

So in December when the Ministerio de Vivienda - the  Ministry of Housing in Lima, Peru - began looking for new options to replace their expensive proprietary software with lower-cost, open source alternatives, it came as no surprise that the open source community eventually led them to Software Libre Andino, a Zimbra / Red Hat distributor in Peru who helped replace their outdated systems with modern ones, including Zimbra for collaboration and Alfresco for document management.

The Ministerio de Vivienda, which is responsible for all the housing, construction and sewer systems in Peru, has a mission to improve access to adequate housing and basic services to all the citizens of Peru. Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in their decision to deploy open source solutions is they found that open platforms allow their users to easily integrate and build new solutions on top of this foundation.

In this case they were able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet created by Zimbra community members and allow a simple way for employees to store documents that are attached in email on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. Simple, inuitive integrations like these make it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs, instead of choosing proprietary options.

We love to hear stories of how Zimbra and open source technologies travel the globe – if you have any stories you want to share, drop us a line.

(Below: Save attachment to Alfresco and add an attachment to Zimbra from Alfresco).

Zimbra Gallery Pages:
Save in Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet Peru

Some may have heard recently we are putting more emphasis on developing our Zimbra partner channels.  We are fortunate to already have more than 700 partners, including Hosting Service Providers, VARs and SIs who are doing great work; we plan on growing our program globally with more partners and new tools for them (stay tuned, more to come here).

We have kicked off the extended program internally and it’s already beginning to bear fruit.  The Zimbra EMEA team recently attended Red Hat’s EMEA Partner Summit in Malta and was among the honorees for Partner of the Year.  Red Hat and Zimbra have been working more closely together over the last several months; it’s a great value proposition for customers who prefer working closely with one vendor for an integrated application-OS solution.  We’ve had several recent wins together including one of the largest government organizations in the Middle East and in Latin America.

Here is Red Hat’s news summary from the EMEA Partner Summit.   Also below is a snap from the awards evening.  Pictured: Werner Knoblich, VP & GM for Red Hat EMEA; Lars Ronning, GM Zimbra EMEA; Gloria Coviello, Zimbra Director EMEA Sales; Petra Heinrich, Director of Partners & Alliances for Red Hat EMEA.  Wonder who played the trick on us with the logo.  ;)

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Few things get our community excited like a major release version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Today marks availability of the first GnR preview: ZCS 6.0 Beta 1 Open Source Edition. Admins and developers can find it over on the downloads page, for the less technically inclined we’ll also have a new hosted demo up shortly.

Some feature highlights:

» A new horizontal ‘three panel’ view with the message on the right.

» There are now tabs for individual messages as well as the compose page.

» Document & Briefcase access from the standard HTML client.

» Share management & discovery UI that lets you see all shares (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, docs, etc) at a glance. Join a distribution list late? Find all existing shares with the group.

» The ability to run existing email filters over the contents of a folder.

» Did you get it? Know instantly, as read receipts have been implemented in the web-client.

» Improved calendar resource auto-accept/decline conflict handling.

» Calendar fisheye view – previously in Zimbra Desktop, now in ZCS.

  » Auto-updating RSS feeds & ICS event URLs on a configurable schedule.

  » Per-user blacklists & whitelists are exposed in the revamped mail preferences area.

» ‘Published’ Zimlets management for end users in options. (Zimlets themselves can now define a new application or preferences tab.)

» Mobile web-client overhauls: Including a special mini logon page, better appointment creation, and six new variants based on device type and connection speed.

» Auto-complete from shared address books; and recently used contacts are presented first.

» Configurable spell check on every send.

» On-behalf-of aka sendAs option on compose in shared folders/relationship accounts.

» Appointment list view & refined print layouts.

» Full featured detached message view for the advanced AJAX client.

» Attach files during mail compose directly from the briefcase; in the briefcase UI you can now send as attachments or links.

» Pressure-based scrolling of folder and message list (within the same page).

» OpenLDAP now allows for some on-the-fly configuration changes with zmlocalconfig via a cn=config backend instead of slapd.conf text files for preservation across upgrades.

» GALsync accounts via datasource contact folders with sorting, browsing, and enhanced client usability.

» MySQL as the logger DB has been removed, in favor of more zmstat service implementation mixed with SQLite & RRD for the new logger service.

» Role based delegated permissions on every individual feature. Now you can create distribution list managers, while HSP’s can give someone permission to manage multiple domains from one login. (The network edition will include easy admin console configuration; open source edition may contain some code.)

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There are just too many enhancements to list here so we could only cover a few; check out the beta on a test server, then let us know what you think below or over in the Community Forums. Release notes are here. (Note: We advise against upgrading if using the Posix/Samba or Disclaimer add-ons, the process will be documented shortly.) This is the first release of several in our testing cycle; general availability of ZCS 6.0 is targeted for the summer.

Update: Please note the original date- April Fools Day – –we’re just kidding– enjoy!   We do not have a Windows Version of Zimbra server.  If you want to run Zimbra Collaboration Suite server on Windows, we recommend using Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance!

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Here is a link to the Zimbra Appliance news release:

Zimbra Appliance: Your Collaboration Cloud To Deploy Anywhere

If you are an end user and want to have a cool email and collaboration client for your Windows Desktop, you can always download the Zimbra Desktop — it works with any email account (and Twitter and Facebook)!

Zimbra DESKTOP

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At Zimbra we have been very focused on measuring everything about our products’ adoption, usage and website in order to make improvements for our community and customers. We freely admit to having a burgeoning stats addiction, and though not everyone whoops it up when we barrel through the cubes shouting about the latest Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop download numbers, we think most folks will appreciate this one:

Zimbra paid mailboxes – 41 million and counting.

Crossing the 40 million mark is a big milestone and the credit lies with the growing Zimbra Community (more than 20,000 members strong) and our customers who have helped spread the word.  And our 40M paid mailboxes doesn’t even include Zimbra’s millions of open source users.
We are seeing growth in all of our products: Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Zimbra Hosted and Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and demand for next-gen, open source solutions is strong even in this tough climate.

The primary driver in our rapid mailbox growth is our worldwide partner network. This partner network includes consumer service providers, business hosting providers, VARs and system integrators. Zimbra now has more than 675 Zimbra partners who bring their expertise and focus to the 14 industries, as well as government and education institutions, we serve. Zimbra’s partner network now includes Comcast, Eircom, HP, Frontier, Homestead, Brinkster, Red Hat and more, and these partners and others have expanded the Zimbra customer base to more than 70 countries worldwide.

The graph below shows Zimbra’s paid mailbox growth from when we began sales in 2006 to present.

In addition to strong overall mailbox momentum, we are encouraged by the growth of our customer base outside of North America. Today the majority of our new prospects (68%) are coming from Latin America, Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). It is clear evidence of the power of a global open source community and the impact of new mandates for open source software. Below is a chart of Zimbra paying customers by region; all-in-all more than 60,000 organizations are using Zimbra.

Before heading back to the math grindstone, we want to share one other fun data nuggets: Zimbra Desktop is just shy of two million downloads (we’re estimating we’ll get there in a week). 

Thanks again to all Zimbra Desktop users for your support and feedback – we wouldn’t be where we are today without you; stay tuned for Desktop GA right around the corner!

We had a Mac oriented year-in-review, but some have asked “what about those of use who aren’t apple fanboys?” So as the holidays become a distant memory of nothing more than food, friends, and family; thought we’d take a 2nd moment to look back at community contributions and other happenings of 2008.

What seems like only a little while ago, we posted on our 10,000th forum member, and just two months thereafter we hit 11,000. We promise not to post stats every few thousand registrations, but these are just so staggering:

• Sept 2005: We started the forums.
• Nov  2006:  5k Members
• Sept 2007: 10K Members
• Nov  2007: 11K Members
• Dec  2008: 20K Members

In simple math, that’s almost double (x1.7) our growth rate over the past year. In that same time period the amount of posts and threads have also skyrocketed.

The fact that so many active members stick around to contribute and help their brethren on topics ranging from administration to development plus everything in-between, continues to amaze, impress, and makes us proud. Zimbra is clearly about something more – giving back, enhancing, and shaping the future of communication.

Seems more of you need to subscribe to the blog though (visits vs subscriptions) but I digress – hint: There’s a box on the right ;)

As our organization turns five, and our community three we just wanted to echo one more giant thank you. Your feedback and ideas are what keeps us pushing the limits of collaboration. We couldn’t do it without you.

Often hitting over 600 new registrations a month, and pushing close to 120,000 posts – the forums are so busy we thought we’d give you a little update, just in-case you haven’t had the opportunity to take it all in!

Here’s a bit of the highlights from the past year:

 
Going Mobile

Some excellent contributors have stepped up to make Open Source mobile synchronization for contacts, calendaring, and tasks a reality.

It’s may seem like a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart, but you can checkout the Funambol thread or find more info here. (Special thanks to Hillman, Wolfroma & Costa-101)

Want just open source push mail? You can find directions over in this wiki.

We’ve made our Java based ZimbraME client open source. Get the code from our public perforce cache, then modify & combile it for your needs. It will build and run on just about any phone that runs J2ME. You can also download one of our pre-compiled releases – including one for BlackBerry devices.

Too daring for your taste? The two mobile web-client cousins (main & mainx) are also available in complete open source and work in just about every browser. They provide excellent JSP tag lib examples for making your own portals or quick optimized client – they have all sorts of uses. (We promise more info on creating these home tab portals is coming shortly.)

 
Community Builds

We’ve added an amazing team of OpenSource Buildmasters that put out community builds for Ubuntu 8 32/64-bit (now an official release), Solaris 9 & 10, Mac OS X 10.4 PPC, OpenSUSE, and even FreeBSD – yes you didn’t misread that list.

(Dijichi2, Osmedts, and many more have done an excellent job!)
 
Mail-Clients
 

 
There’s always those that love their favorite thick-client so much we’d have to pry it from their cold dead hands. For Thunderbird fans Zindus has taken ZCS<>Thunderbird sync for personal AND shared contacts to a whole new level. (Thank you lmj!)

 

Zimbra Desktop builds have been packed with new content that you’re just going to have to read all the blog entries on Beta 5, Beta 4 & Beta 3. It’s not just about ZCS Sync anymore, ZD is here to help you connect with multiple major providers. We’re in the process of joining multiple repositories to bring it to the masses easier. Plus it’s a perfect testbed for quickly developing new themes or Zimlets without installing an entire test server. There’s even a community developed Solaris port by SivaSSKumar available here.


Tools, Extensions, & Zimlets

- Pbruna built ZimbraNotify, a Linux Toaster equivalent.

- Samba & Posix extensions now come pre-bundled.

- Deugenin developed an extension for global email footers!

Zimlets Galore: From the self backup ideas of StarXpert & Fbackup, to user-managed resource & location control from the ZWC, plus a whole slew of excellent collaboration tools – you can find a whole lot more Zimlets in the gallery. (And “Zimlet Month” is coming up fast.)

 
Other Cool Stuff

The new DnD Zimlet & FF extension allows you to to simply drag attachments from your desktop into you web-client’s mail compose window or briefcase. We plan to make this cross-browser/multi-platform using Yahoo’s BrowserPlus in the future, and in ZCS 6.0 we can alert you to new mail on your desktop – or even read your mails back to you out loud.

We’ve honed our CalDAV & free-busy interop calendaring with participation in multiple CalConnect roundtables.

The developer section of the forums is abound with stuff from an AJAX ticker on the login page, to perl access modules, and not one but two a interesting methods for individual and global read receipts.

Integrate Zimbra into your favorite browser in the form of mail/appointment notices, a toolbar, or make your daily ZCS interactions more useful with things like FF3’s new protocol handlers. Plus WebDav has so many uses that people are only starting to discover.

There’s also 1, 2, 3 reasons you have no excuse to not be backing up – more here, and we made it so simple that even users can do it. And some recent HA ideas if you’re not one for DRBD or some other favorites.

 
Forum Enhancements

The forum got a theme revamp, portable edition, and revised layouts.

Some new areas include:
* Specific product sections like Zimbra Desktop, Connector for Blackberry, and the J2ME phone client.
* A section dubbed ‘Camp Zimbra‘ for those who’ve completed official training and become ‘Alumni’.    
* Zimbra in Education gives our EDU professionals a opportunity to unite.
* An /etc lounge for general conversation.
There’s now one click access to Wiki Sandboxes – make yourself a reference guide or use it to troubleshoot.

And last but not least, we’ve increased the size of our awesome crew of volunteer moderators and regulars who give up their time to answer your admin and developer related questions everyday.

Thanks to all who visit the forums for making our community first rate!

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If you haven’t kept up with Zimbra upgrades in a while we’re currently about to release ZCS 5.0.12 with more features than we could mention in a blog post – you can find a quick list via the product management portal. And we promise a few ZCS 6.0 teasers soon.

If you didn’t get the opportunity to visit us in Orlando for the 2008 Educause conference, the 2009 Southwest regional is already coming up on February 24th through 26th.

This year’s annual gathering will focus on cyberinfrastructure and e-scholarship, managing the enterprise, as well as the evolving role of IT and leadership in learning. The symposium is being held at the Marriott Plaza in San Antonio, Texas. We won’t have a typical booth, but drop us a line if you want to meet-up and discuss anything Zimbra. Thanks to all who dropped by during last weeks Mid-Atlantic conference!

If your going, or need an excuse to go; on Wednesday evening we’re hosting dinner/cocktails from 6 – 8 pm for our current customers, plus any of you who may still be on the fence and want to chat further or swap insights.

Restaurant Info:
-Boudro’s (~.5 miles from the events) located at 421 East Commerce Street.
-Space is limited, so be sure to contact us for availability if you’re interested.

More info on sessions, seminars, speakers, and presentations: program site & full conference agenda.

 

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Can’t make it? Of course we’ll be at the Mid-west (Chicago) and Western (San Francisco) Educause colloquium’s in March and April, as well as the the big one in November (Denver).

Check out the events page to see other places we’ll be.

Every year, the Macworld Expo brings together a loyal and diverse base of Mac users which also happens to make up a core set of Zimbra’s customers. Once again this year you’ll find us at the show. We’re setting up house with 01.com (one of our many partners) at booth 4328 – we hope you can stop by and find out how Zimbra works seamlessly with Apple products at home or on the go. And if you can’t make it, take a look at our 2008 recap of Mac-related news, or visit http://www.zimbra.com/apple/ for more information.

December
Inquisitor, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in the Web browser, was acquired by Yahoo! and launched for Safari 3 in May, and then for Firefox 2 and 3, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in October. Last month, in the Desktop Beta 5 release, we launched built-in Inquisitor support for the search bar – bringing Zimbra users access to Inquisitor’s fast, smart and flexible search experience.

October
In October, Zimbra and Yahoo! hosted the CalConnect Roundtable, a symposium on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies, including iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV(3) standards. The meeting allowed us to collaborate with some big corporations including Apple, Google, Kerio, Microsoft and Sun, as well as some major universities to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

July
We love poker at Zimbra so with July we get to watch the world series and we get to play at our very own poker tables.  By mid-summer, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone arrived – bringing over-the-air synchronization to the native email, address book and calendar apps on any iPhone with 2.0 software and ZCS Network Edition with Zimbra Mobile enabled – just in time for loading up on the new iPhone 3G.

June
We’re always trying to find new ways to make the user experience faster, and this summer we put all the latest Web browsers to the test. We found Safari 3.3.1 to be the winner of the browser wars – an ideal companion to the Zimbra Web Client for the fastest collaboration experience yet.

February
In February, we launched a great improvement to Zimbra Collaboration Suite with our 5.0 release. In Zimbra’s traditionally inclusive style, we launched with support for Mac OS and for any mobile web browser, including the Apple iPhone. ZCS 5.0 also included the beta release of Zimbra Desktop, which gave all PC, Mac, and Linux machines the same rich Zimbra experience online and offline.

January
At MacWorld last year, we gave our Apple customers more to cheer about as we embraced support for Apple products and technologies, including Safari 3 and CalDAV for Mac OS X Leopard.

We look forward to 2009 and all the really cool stuff we are going to (very soon) launch.

Admins in the U.S got a chance to talk shop at EDUCAUSE and the LISA ‘08 summit, but what about those in Europe? Don’t despair, because we’re co-hosting a mini-conference with MySQL, SchoolForge, RedHat, Sun, Op5, and Fusis at our UK headquarters in London on November 27th.

While the presentations are specifically aimed at education as well as the non-profit sector, anyone is welcome to attend. Engage us in discussions about your thoughts on the latest technology, how it blends with your school’s ICT strategy, or tackle open source trends for the future. Details on the schedule are over at OpenSourceInSchools.org.uk (of course registration is free, and besides providing the specifics it also gets you a complimentary lunch).