Your IT needs are growing and evolving and virtualization is a key to your growth. There are significant benefits of placing business critical applications such as email and collaboration in a virtualized environment. Join our LIVE webinar and hear the Top Ten reasons to virtualize VMware Zimbra on vSphere.
Some of the topics covered include:
The challenges of business continuity and disaster recovery with email platforms
How virtualization addresses and simplifies business continuity and disaster recovery
How Zimbra on vSphere simplifies BC/DR implementation & testing
Your IT needs are growing and evolving and virtualization is a key to your growth. There are significant benefits of placing business critical applications such as email and collaboration in a virtualized environment.
Don’t forget to register for this month’s webinars:
Thursday, February 23rd for Altimeter Group founder and author Charlene Li, and Socialcast founder Tim Young for a webinar to discuss the new Altimeter Group report “Making the Case for Enterprise Social Networks.” Whether you’re looking for information on where to get started or already have an enterprise social network implemented, find out how to make the most of the biggest shift in communications and IT platforms since email.
Wednesday, February 29th for Top 10 Reasons to Virtualize Zimbra on vSphere discussing how virtualization is the key to simplify business continuity and disaster recovery. Hear how we have tested and implemented our findings.
We are looking forward to seeing everyone at this year’s EDUCAUSE 2011 Conference in Philadelphia! We have a lot to share with you this year as we continue in our mission to deliver technologies and infrastructure that enhance the way people work in the post-PC era.
We’re especially excited to show you a sneak peek of what is coming in ZCS 8.0 and an early preview of our new file sharing application, Project Octopus. And, we’d like to invite you to our VMware Cocktail Reception on Tuesday evening. This year we’ll be in historic downtown Philadelphia at Del Frisco’s. Also, please stop by and see us in booth #1439.
VMware Zimbra Roadmap Presentation on Tuesday, 10/18 at 2:30 PM
Please join us for the Zimbra Roadmap Presentation on Tuesday, October 18th at 2:30 PM. During this Roadmap presentation, you will learn more about the exciting new features being developed for our biggest release ever, ZCS 8.0! You’ll get a sneak peek at some of the new features including priority inbox, social mail, calendars with activity streams and new self-service administration tools. You will also get an early preview of our new secure, cloud-based file sharing application, Project Octopus, designed to transform the way people collaborate.
Space is limited, please RSVP by Friday, October 14th to reserve your seat.
Date and Time:
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
2:30-4 PM
Location: Maggiano’s Little Italy
Napoli Room
1201 Filbert Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-567-2020
VMware Cocktail Reception on Tuesday, October 18 at 6:30 PM
You are cordially invited to the VMware Cocktail Reception on Tuesday, October 18th in Philadelphia, PA. This year, we have selected a great spot in the heart of the Center City Philadelphia at Del Frisco’s in the historical First Pennsylvania Bank Building. We look forward to spending an evening with great friends over cocktails and Hors d’oeuvres!
Space is limited so please RSVP by Friday, October 14th.
Date and Time:
Tuesday, October 18
6:30-8:00 PM
Location: Del Frisco’s
1426 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-246-0533
Visit VMware Zimbra Booth #1439
We’ll be showcasing ZCS and Project Octopus, along with demos of the other VMware products like View, Fusion, vSphere and SlideRocket.
We thank you for your continued support and feedback and we look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia!
August 29-September 1 at The Venetian in Las Vegas
October 18-20, Bella Center, Copenhagen
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We are just three weeks away from VMworld 2011 and we are looking forward to showcasing Zimbra products, including a sneak peek of ZCS 8 and some new products we are working on!
VMworld 2011 is a great way to learn about the latest technology innovations with more than 175 breakout sessions and labs-featuring topics that will cover everything from virtualizing business critical applications to integrating social collaboration tools that enhance productivity. Plus, VMworld offers additional learning opportunities, such as the Knowledge Experts Program, numerous networking events, and the Solutions Exchange, featuring over 250 companies.
Whether you’re new to VMworld or have attended before, VMworld 2011 is a great way to learn about the latest technology innovations and network with your peers and industry experts. And, you won’t want to miss this year’s party with the band, The Killers!
Below is a list of the Zimbra activities that we have planned. If you have not already registered and you would like to attend this year’s event, click on the link below to get to the registration page. We hope to see you at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas!
Speaking & Group Sessions
VMware Zimbra: Next Generation Collaboration for Your Cloud: John Robb & Sam Khavari
Plan, Build and Deliver a VMware Zimbra Cloud Application Business: Jing To & Azdio Ballesteros
VMware Zimbra: Better Than Exchange: Jon Dybik
Zimbra the New SMB Game Changer: Paul Murphy
Zimbra Group Discussion: John Robb
Education & Hands-on Lab
Exploring your Core Email and Collaboration Services Migration Options: Anup Patwardhan & Azdio Ballesteros
Tomorrow the VMware and Zimbra team will be hosting a live webinar covering some key differences between Zimbra and Google Apps. It will be quite informative and an opportunity to ask questions of the Zimbra team; here is the webinar information from the Zimbra Webinar Series:
Zimbra Collaboration Suite vs. Google Apps
There are significant benefits of placing business critical applications such as email and collaboration in the cloud. Invest 45 minutes and learn what the key differentiators are when it comes to secure, cloud-based email and collaboration.
Topics covered in the LIVE webinar include:
Key feature & benefits comparison
Live Zimbra Demo
Q&A Session with Zimbra Product Team
Wednesday, January 19th
10:00 AM – US Pacific Standard Time
If you cannot attend in person tomorrow, a recording will be available about a week after. Please be sure to visit our webinar page where you can find it as well as other upcoming webinars; here is a tentative upcoming webinar list:
We are headed to Anaheim for this year’s EDUCAUSE Conference next week and we are really looking forward to seeing everyone! Since last year, we have started a new chapter as part of VMware and we have been working to integrate our products and channels to continue to bring you innovative, open source email and collaboration services that set the standards for web-based collaboration in the cloud. We have a lot of events planned for this year’s conference, and we’d like to invite you to join us to hear more about our product roadmap, share you feedback, get a sneak peek at some upcoming new features, and enjoy an evening of great food and jazz music, New Orleans style!
Visit the VMware/Zimbra Booth (#941)
We’ll be showcasing the new features that will launch in the upcoming ZCS 7.0, Desktop 2.0 and Zimbra Connector for BES 5.0 releases later this year. You’ll see these new features along with demos of some of the other VMware products so stop by and see us in Booth #941.
Join the Zimbra Advisory Meeting on Tuesday, 10/12
Please help us shape the future of Zimbra. You are invited to our Zimbra Advisory Meeting to discuss and share your feedback on our product roadmap and future releases. If you have not already replied, please RSVP by Thursday, 10/7 to reserve your seat.
Date: Tuesday, October 12th
Time: 1-3 pm
Location:Sheraton Anaheim Hotel (900 South Disneyland Drive, 1.5 miles from the Anaheim Convention Center)
Transportation: A shuttle will be provided. Please meet at 12:30 PM at the Shuttle Stop in front of the Hilton Anaheim. The shuttle bus will be clearly marked indicating the destination as the Sheraton Anaheim Hotel. At the conclusion of the event, the shuttle will take you back to the Convention Center for the opening reception of EDUCAUSE 2010.
We cordially invite you to spend an evening with great friends, jazz music and food at Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen. If you have not already replied, RSVP by Thursday, October 7 to reserve your seat.
Date: Wednesday, October 13th
Cocktails: 6:30pm – 7:30 pm (in the Courtyard)
Dinner: 7:30pm – 10:30 pm (in the Parlor Room)
Location: Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen (Downtown Disney District)
Please join us for our discussion on “Next Generation Collaboration, the Cloud and Virtualization: How to Transform and Simplify IT”, moderated by our very own Greg Armanini on Thursday, October 14th at 1pm in Room#210A.
We thank you for your continued support and feedback and we look forward to seeing you in Anaheim!
In final installment of this series we recently had a chance to sit down with Frances Atkinson, the Director of Institutional & Academic Technologies, IT Services at Simon Fraser University, one of the over 500 educational organizations that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. Not too long ago, SFU decided to upgrade their collaboration system and investigated several options. No surprise, Zimbra won out! Now, two and a half years later, SFU is seeing how Zimbra is benefiting all of their campus systems.
Highlights from our discussion with Frances are below:
How are SFU’s staff, faculty, and students using Zimbra Collaboration Suite?
Zimbra has become more than just an email and calendaring solution at Simon Fraser – it has evolved into the campus communications “hub” used by all faculty, staff and students. With Zimbra, calendaring and document sharing are available to everyone for the first time, and fewer users are forwarding to external sites like Gmail. Additionally, SFU connected Zimbra to other campus systems increasing campus-wide organization and efficiency. Students and faculty also have the ability to access Zimbra via mobile devices, including BlackBerrys. This mobile access is even more important since we now have the ability to send out notifications to all users for emergencies, weather, downtime, etc.
How are you customizing Zimbra to meet the needs of the SFU student body?
SFU is taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source functionality by using several Zimlets – including Calendar Scheduler, Arcade, Google Translator and Yahoo Local – we are able to extend the product and bring features to people who may not have otherwise found these resources.
We have even generated Zimlets of our own. These SFU Zimlets offer students and faculty a simple way to access course information, alerts/tips & tricks and their mySFU profiles. The course resource Zimlet is definitely the most important Zimlet for the students. It allows them to pull up all their course information for the current, past and next term, including the course description, syllabus, video content and digitized lectures. It helps to keep students organized and on track to graduate. Faculty and staff also utilize Zimlets to reserve rooms and equipment.
Additionally, we have branded Zimbra as SFU Connect, and we got the community involved by holding a naming and logo contest. We’ve personalized SFU Connect by providing users with a tip/trick or message of the day upon startup to help them use the portal to its full capacity.
What are your students and/or faculty saying about Zimbra?
Zimbra satisfied the desire of the students and faculty to have access to a modern, feature-rich, communications environment. Not only is the email and calendaring solution functional and well-suited to serve the entire campus, but its open source nature is lauded by faculty and students alike. By choosing an open source product, SFU has the potential to integrate with other products as the University’s needs continue to evolve.
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!
All of our Edu customers benefit from Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, and many are contributing their own custom mash-ups to make Zimbra’s online tools work for best for them. Institutions like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Simon Fraser University are creating special Zimlets to better serve their students and faculty. You can read more about their specific case studies in our back to school blog series.
Other recent mash-ups include DimDim’s application tab (pictured below), which allow users to access DimDim’s web conferencing services from within Zimbra. Additionally, a new social media Zimlet enables users to read and post tweets to Twitter, or make updates to Facebook and Digg from directly within the ZCS, without having to take the time to visit other websites.
This year we will be joined at the conference by Zimbra customers University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech who will be speaking about how Zimbra has streamlined collaboration across their institutions and discuss how implementing a collaborative email and calendar provider can be extremely cost-effective.
If you are going to be at the conference, don’t forget to check out their panel on Friday, November 6th and please stop by and visit us at booth #332. We will be giving away some great prizes!
We are headed to Anaheim for this year’s 
How are SFU’s staff, faculty, and students using Zimbra Collaboration Suite?
