In 2003, we founded Zimbra because we thought that existing e-mail and calendaring solutions were broken and we knew we could create something much better – that something is the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), an Ajax-based collaboration client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, instant message, documents with sharing capabilities, advanced search and VoIP into a browser-based interface. We owe the thousands of members of the Zimbra community many thanks for their ongoing contributions – together, we’ve achieved great things!

We’ve given customers “new and improved” mailboxes and we’ve focused on creating the best possible experience for collaboration – streamlining overflowing inboxes, organizing correspondence, and reducing the hassles of managing communication tools on the back-end.

A year ago, we joined the Yahoo! family to extend Zimbra’s reach, share our expertise to one of the top mail services in the world – Yahoo! Mail – and to continue to change the face of how users collaborate at school, work, and home. Yahoo! has given us the resources, including greater computing power, to continue to expand and update ZCS with new features, and support an ever-growing customer base.

We’re proud of our accomplishments over the past year. On the customer front, we welcomed a number of world-class organizations. Stanford, UMass (Dartmouth), UPenn, CalPoly, and Texas A&M are among the institutions that drove well over a million mailboxes sold in the education market this year, driving record growth across all the markets we serve. There are now over 15 million Zimbra mailboxes deployed, serving over 25,000 customers in 82 countries, expanding our world-class reach. That reach has been further expanded through partnerships with Red Hat, Apple, and Ubuntu.

This past year also reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation as demonstrated by the stream of enhancements to the Zimbra product family:

• The launch of ZCS 5.0 extended BlackBerry and Outlook 2007 support plus Web 2.0 IM and task applications;
• Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop – currently in beta – provides users with offline access to a simple, centralized place to manage work, school and personal e-mail without an Internet connection;
• Extensive mobile options give our users anytime, anywhere access to ZCS and extend Zimbra to the broadest range of devices available in the market. Mobile options now include iPhone 2.0, smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, Treo, etc.) and any Java-enabled mobile device (Nokia E & N Series, Motorola RAZR, ROKR etc.). These build on Yahoo!’s leadership in e-mail and mobile Web services as a key starting point for consumers.

We’ve got tons more in the pipeline. Later this year, we’ll be debuting new products that continue to make collaboration a superior experience, such as the general availability for Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and exciting cloud services for universities and businesses. Look out for more developments with the Open Mail initiative that debuted at Yahoo! Hack Day last week, along with other cool synergies with Yahoo! Mail and Calendar.

- Thanks Again! The Zimbra Team

HackDay just kicked off, and we’ve seen all sorts of things go from idea to prototype in just 24 hours. This year has a twist: Not only are our engineers across the globe involved (with many making it an all-nighter) but everyone is invited to participate – even you. Open Hack 2008 takes place September 12-13th where anyone with an idea is encouraged to gather a team up, then spend a day building stuff that they think is cool. HackU (the University Hackdown) is even flying in its top ranks, with a few Zimbra customers among them (including Stanford & Georgia Tech) to join us at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, CA for rounds of coding; plus camaraderie, food, demos, awards, and good music. From our team KevinH & JohnH are also giving several presentations throughout the event.

Some of the things we’re ran across have given us ideas for Zimlets – so we’re hereby seeking Zimlet beta testers. This will be an ongoing project, meaning that those who volunteer will get continuous access to the latest and greatest Zimlet ideas.

We need volunteers that:

• Are using either ZCS (with the ability to deploy Zimlets – so essentially administrators of the respective system) or Zimbra Desktop users.

• Are willing to try out different services that some of these may link to, and consciously note how they affect their daily Zimbra experience.
• Of course give us feedback about their place in productivity, effectiveness, usefulness, and anything you’d like to see added or extended.

To join in just send me a PM/Email by the end of this week. (We’ll be sure to reward you for your efforts.)

We can’t take everyone, so if you not accepted don’t feel bad – there’s still plenty of cool & useful Zimlets over in the Gallery – plus they’ll soon be making it off engineer workstations and into perforce. We’re even working on a way to make them easier to install in Zimbra Desktop, but you can find current directions here.

Those on the development side will soon see a few community members marked “Zimlet Guru” – if you’ve created a few yourself, and are into helping out others in the Zimlet section of the forums, be sure to drop me a line.

It’s truly amazing how excited people get over Zimbra – so thought we’d share some of the ways people show it.

We were pleasantly surprised a few days ago when a school declared a ‘national Zimbra day’ and sent us pictures of cupcakes (that we can virtually enjoy). Why the baked goods? They recently rolled out ZCS and love it. Since we are also launching 5.0.9 today it’s fitting.

As the summer is the perfect time for schools to do system upgrades when students aren’t around, Thunder04’s organization had a conversion party while they worked on their switchover – with some delicious goodies of course.


The Menlo Park City School District (which serves Menlo Park & Atherton in California) would like to wish you all a “Happy Zimbra Conversion or Upgrade Day” as ZCS 5.0.9 has just been released! (This version includes additional beta builds for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in both x86 & 64-bit as well.)

 

One of the largest areas of growth for Zimbra has been the educational sector. Perhaps it’s the simple calendar and mail sharing…or maybe it’s the built-in instant messaging. Since the beginning, Zimbra has been a perfect fit for thousands of Educational Institutions around the world.

After receiving a suggestion from one of our large EDU customers, we decided to open up a “Zimbra in Education” forum.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I worked for six years as an IT Director for a school district in Arizona. I know the many challenges that our EDU IT administrators face. Things like Windows Group Permissions, and Internet Filters, and HIPPA and FERPA Compliance. Schools are like a revolving door. I remember every summer, locking out old accounts and provisioning new accounts. ugh, it was the bane of my existence…

So just how do you handle those issues? How are you integrating with authentication sources? What about login scripts? Well, we hope that by opening this new forum, our EDU crowed will share their stories (both bad and good). Take a look: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-education/

At Zimbra, we have many great customers in a wide range of industries, from financial services (H&R Block), to healthcare (Huntsville Hospital), to manufacturing (Middleville Tool and Die). Recently we have begun picking up steam in the education market, and we have been lucky to have over 300 educational institutions around the globe as customers.

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We’re continuing our Webinar Higher Ed Series with “Deploying Zimbra on Campus- A Case Study of Best Practices and Lessons Learned”. I’m told that all of the slots are filling up fast, so you should register today to insure you’ve got a spot. It will be moderated by Matt Asay, noted open source strategist and CNET blogger and VP of Business Development for Alfresco. We also have several guest speakers.

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We invite you to join our webinar tomorrow(Oct 16), “Unicon Higher-Ed Round 2″. As someone who worked in Education for six years as an IT Director, I know that costs vs features are typically the first thing educational institutions look at. So how can Zimbra help you?

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Calling all Educational Administrators! Zimbra is going to NECC 2007 on June 25-27, 2007 in Atlanta, and we’ve got some free passes to give away.

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