Zimbra

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.

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!

Adam Preset spoke at EDUCAUSE Annual with Pam Buffington of Georgia Tech on “Implementing a Cost-Effective and User-Friendly E-Mail, Calendaring, and Collaboration System.”

It’s that time of year again and we are making our way to Denver for the annual EDUCAUSE conference.

We’ve got lots to talk about this year – not only did we cross a huge milestone, reaching 50 million paid mailboxes in less than four years, but we’ve continued to expand our reach in the Edu community (which alone is comprised of millions of paid mailboxes).  New Edu customers this year alone include Eastern Michigan University, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Marietta College, Saint Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Findlay, and Wayne State University.

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!

In part three of this series, we’d like to introduce you to Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bruce has been an esteemed advocate for Zimbra since the campus switched over to our offerings two years ago. If you recall, we highlighted some of UWM’s creations in our original post, including their White Pages, Availability, Help Tool, and Subscription Center Zimlets. We recently caught up with them to get the low down on Zimbra happenings across campus.

Read more from our Q&A with Bruce below:

How many people are using Zimbra on campus?
Approximately 50,000 users since last summer. Practically every department had a different setup. We recently had our fourth Microsoft Exchange migration, this time with University Police, and they are already productively utilizing Zimbra as their email and calendaring tool. We also had three Groupwise environments migrate, and they had very few issues after conversion.

What’s your favorite thing about Zimbra?
Given the state of the economy and our budget, the favorite thing for me is that I am able to deploy services for mail and calendar for 50k accounts with under three full time employees total, all staffing included. The system administrators who formally supported distributed Exchange and Groupwise environments have now been able to focus on higher value added services for our faculty.

What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve gotten since deployment?
That’s easy. The calendar has been a strong focus since the start, and our end-users really appreciate that we now have a fully enterprise calendar linking faculty, staff, and students in one integrated environment. We have connected the calendar with our other sources, such as our course management tool, student system, and tutoring/mentoring scheduler; everyone has responded very favorably to each new feature.

Have any institutional issues been solved or mitigated since introducing Zimlets?
We have a big test ahead of us this fall with the debut of our Subscription Center Zimlet. We expect it to have a positive impact on student retention through the ability to better organize all aspects of the lives of new students from the first day they show up on campus. I can’t wait to see the results.

---

You can get further insight about UWM’s deployment here. Need help with your own concept – or have an design idea for extending Zimbra? Let us know over in the forums.

In our first post of the series, we highlighted a few of the recent creations coming out of Wayne State University – their Broadcast, AccessID, and Anti-Phishing Zimlets. Given the unique customization abilities, there are many reasons and motives behind every Zimlet’s conception. So, we decided to check in with Systems Analyst Rob Thompson, to provide some context behind their latest extensions.

Highlights from our Q&A with Rob are below:

How long have you been running Zimbra?
The university started evaluating mail systems in earnest during the 1st quarter of 2008. We went full production for all of our 70,000 users in June 2009.

What’s your favorite Zimlet and why?
One of the most popular is our AccessID Zimlet. Our previous email system did not have an extensible API that would allow us to integrate our directory information into email content. Zimbra’s ability to create context-sensitive events allows our users to mouse-over an internal WSU ID number (which are quite cryptic) and instantly retrieve a name, department, phone, email address, and other data from our directory about the referenced user.

Were there any campus issues in particular that inspired you to leverage mashups?
Integration with student content applications and existing frameworks are where we are seeing the most demand, and thus where we are focusing our development. This includes L-Soft Listserv, a home-grown announcement service, class schedule information and more. Since going live, we have had a steady stream of requests to leverage external systems into the Zimbra user interface. Many of these projects are already well underway.

What are students and/or faculty saying about your Zimlets?
Since we’re very early on in our rollout, every compliment seems to come with another request for more integration work! In the past we have had to turn these requests down, as they were simply not possible with the software at hand. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us, and are very excited to have the opportunity to accomplish them with Zimbra.

   

---

Stay tuned for part three. To answer some common questions from our first entry: A few of the Zimlets mentioned aren’t available in the gallery, since they are written in a way that interacts with specific back-end systems at each institution. Where possible the authors are working to separate usable code for the broader benefit of all. In the meantime, you can get help with connectors like these and your own ideas over in the community forums.

It’s September, which signals the time students will be returning to school. At Zimbra, this means continuing our work with the more than 500 institutions that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. We are thrilled to help educators and students alike with their communication needs in over 33 countries, including institutions such as Kansas State, Texas A & M, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.

With “back-to-school” in the air, we thought it was an appropriate time to check in on some of our education customers. Turns out, Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, compatibility with other email clients and campus systems, open technologies, easy branding, administrator-friendly architecture, in both hosted and on-premise deployment options aren’t the only reasons why Zimbra continues to be the #1 choice for education. Today, schools are growing contributors to our highly regarded Zimlet program. With customized mash-ups, more and more educational institutions at all levels are taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source roots and community, by easily integrating ZCS with other online tools that students and faculty interact with daily.

A few universities have recently shared with us some examples of useful implementations:

Wayne State University
Message Authenticity Zimlet: Helps the student confirm the authenticity of a message sent by Wayne administration. Users may choose alternative delivery methods and rate the message’s importance relevance to them in order to provide feedback for future news updates.
AccessID Zimlet: This hover-over Zimlet provides users with a quick look into the university directory, making sense of arcane user ID codes.
Anti-Phishing Zimlet: Beyond just marking something as spam, this Zimlet allows users to report an email as a serious phishing attempt into an automatic tickiting system, so that Wayne administrators can research if other users have inadvertently provided personal information when they shouldn’t, and then report back to the campus about any complaint to be aware of.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Subscription Center Zimlet: This Zimlet acts as the single source for consolidated public calendar information enabling users to search, browse, and subscribe to assorted campus and community calendars.
White Pages Zimlet: This Zimlet integrates an existing directory server to provide various phone number, office location, and home address information of students, faculty, and staff, based on their existing privacy settings.
Help Zimlet: Gives users quick access to custom tailored documentation for the campus community as well as video screencasts demonstrating how to use and configure various features of the Zimbra web interface.

Simon Fraser University
Course Resources/mySFU Zimlet: Content put out by professors for a specific class, and also connects to details on course books, library records, campus news, and more.
Tips & Tricks Zimlet: A customized interface with a daily tidbit of useful info for getting the most out of the Zimbra experience as well as computing accross campus.
Broadcast Alert Zimlet: Gets the word out to anyone with Zimbra currently open or upon next login. With students on the system so often to get work done, it’s a great way to send a critical notice.

Stay tuned and we will continue the series with additional screenshots plus more in depth Q&A with a few Zimbra educational customers.

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!

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.

 

---

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.