Zimbra

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).

Q: Can you mention the URL for the new dev Wiki?
A: A good place to start wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/ZCS_6.0:Zimlet_Developers_Guide:Introduction

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Links: Video of the above webinar. You can also browse a list of existing or sign-up for upcoming webinars here.

Recently we updated our listing on VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace with a trial version of ZCS Network Edition 6.0.6. We packaged it up in two formats – traditional VMX/VMDK and the Open Virtualization Format, OVF for short, using VMware Studio. The traditional VMX/VMDK package can be use with VMware’s desktop products like Workstation for Linux/Windows and Fusion for MAC. You can also go grab VMware Player for FREE and test drive the ZCS trial on either Linux or Windows. The OVF package can be used “out-of-the-box” with VMware vSphere or imported to other VMware desktop and server products using the standalone OVF Tool 1.0 or vCenter Converter.

The OVF 1.0 format is a platform independent, DMTF standard that streamlines the application setup process in a virtual environment.  This makes deploying the ZCS trial fast and simple to testdrive the latest features.

• You can deploy the ZCS trial OVF package right from a URL directly to VMware vSphere using the “Deploy OVF Template” wizard in the vSphere Client or the OVF Tool 1.0.
• The vSphere Client reads the OVF template and auto-configures certain virtual machine settings as well as guides you through mapping the network and storage configurations into your target runtime environment.
• You will also be prompted to answer runtime specific installation parameters like the ZCS server’s hostname and the admin username/password.

All of the captured input is used on “first boot” to automatically configure the ZCS trial as a unique running instance complete with an activated 15 day trial license! This is a good example of the collaboration that’s been happening between the Zimbra and vSphere teams and a sign of good things to come as we are busy building our Zimbra virtual appliance.

The Zimbra virtual appliance will be ready to ship later this year and will feature a

• Simplified Admin experience
• Expanded usage of OVF properties to further streamline the deployment process
• New capabilities to simplify patch management, mailbox creation, and migration

For more information, you can check out the appliance RFEs in bugzilla.

UPDATE: You can now find this at http://www.zimbra.com/products/zimbra-appliance.html

We held the first hands-on Zimlet training over at our London offices back in October, where Raja Rao put together such a great presentation and collection of modules that we decided to roll it into a permanent series.

If your organization is interested in enhancing Zimbra via communication with external services, adding extra functionality via widgets and application portals, or just wants to increase usability of existing inline content: We cordially invite you to our beautiful (and relatively warm) Sunnyvale, California campus February 23-24th. Whether your somewhat new to basic object oriented JavaScript programming or already familiar with advanced Zimbra specific SOAP, JSON requests, and hooks; our front-end engineers and best mashup gurus will be available to help get your coding started.

Details on this two day course’s agenda and the registration form can be found here: Zimbra-Training-Registration-Zimlet-Course.pdf

-For more information contact us or email training@
-Local Hotel options: Zimbra-Training-Location-Sunnyvale.pdf
-There are partner discounts, though any member of the community is welcome to attend even if you aren’t a network edition customer.
-Can’t make it in December? We’re holding another in May tentatively the 4th through 5th. Be sure to let us know early if your interested – space is limited and will fill up fast.

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Find out about other sessions (for admins, helpdesk staff, and even end users) over on the training site.

One of the best parts of being open source is seeing the ingenuity of our community. This year we’d like to see how you can use Zimbra themes to make your skin crawl this Halloween…

We’ve mocked up two new designs just in time for witching hour, and hope to get these into the gallery soon, but we’d also like to inspire you to put your Zimbra in a costume!

 
Do you prefer the fun of creepy pumkins, spiders, witches, bats, and black cats? Or is the dark brooding theme with a graveyard and crows more spooky? Vote for your favorite here. The Halloween skin with the most votes will be added to our permanent collection by one of our engineers.

 

Rick found an frightening skull that fit the folder tree well, and he’s already coded it into a downloadable theme – to quote one person’s take: “I couldn’t use it for very long without the hairs on the back of my neck tingling, that face is scary.”

 
Don’t forget, there are plenty of other skins that let your Zimbra play dress up all year long… Halloween isn’t the only time of year when it’s ok to pretend to be someone else!

Are you more of a race car driver, a pretty princess, or work in ACU’s and just can’t get enough digital cammo in your email?

Make your Zimbra reflect your mood or keep things interesting with the skin changer Zimlet, which switches themes automatically using whatever frequency preference you set. For even more variety, why not design your own custom theme!

Tell us what other seasonal themes you’d like to see next, even if their half a year away. Prefer a more traditional fall scheme of changing leaves and landscapes? Checkout what others are doing over in the fourms.

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

 

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3^rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.

 

But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25^th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.

 

We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

 

 

Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs.  “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get the latest version of the Social Zimlet from the Gallery

Thanks again for all your support and feedback; hope you enjoy ZCS 6.0!
Network Edition server download | Open Source Edition server download

 

You can also find a bit more about what’s new in ZCS 6 on the Zimbra website.

During the past 5 years, Zimbra has evolved from a software company selling nearly 100% direct to customers to a model today where well over half of our sales are generated through Zimbra partners.

The channel-focused evolution has been intentional; early on we realized working via Zimbra resellers, hosting partners and systems integrators is the best way Zimbra can satisfy our rapidly growing customer base’s wide-ranging requirements while continuing to grow efficiently.  With this model we’ve been able to increase the number of paid Zimbra customers to over 60,000 organizations, accounting for over 41 million paid mailboxes – the second largest number of paid mailboxes for any email/collaboration product in the U.S.

We certainly couldn’t help deploy or support this number of customers without the involvement of so many valuable Zimbra partners!

Our sales team certainly appreciates the leverage they gain by working hand-in-hand with channel partners.  Given that, we believe finding new ways to work even more closely together will enhance our mutual success and take us to the next level.

Today we’re pleased to take that next step forward by announcing a new Zimbra Partner Program, featuring:

• A new ‘Gold’ tier for our most advanced Zimbra partners
• An updated Partner Portal with new and updated documentation, sales tools and marketing resources
• Improved visibility for our top partners on the Zimbra website
• New opportunities for deal registration
• More Zimbra resources for co-marketing and selling

Please visit our partner website pages for further details (you may also contact or email our channels team).

In the meantime we’ve also been busy launching more than a dozen distribution relationships around the world to provide enhanced services to our network of VARs in the new Zimbra Partner Program.  These new Zimbra distributors include:

• United States: SYNNEX Corporation, as part of the Open Source Channel Alliance, co-sponsored by RedHat
• Europe:  Several distributors including COMMEO and D2B (France), Interactive Ideas (UK), VNC (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), VDEL (Russia and Eastern Europe), and Nordicmind (Scandanavia).
• Middle East & North Africa: Opennet MEA
• South Africa & Sub-Saharan Africa: Linux Warehouse
• Latin America: Red Hat
• Japan: We’re continuing our strong relationship with Sumitomo.

Some of the key VAR benefits from distributors include streamlined process for placing and fulfilling orders, dedicated account managers and communication channels for rapid support, and access to new payment and financing options.  Our sales team will continue to work directly with our VAR partners (and as often as needed, with the end customers).

We believe the new program is right in line with Zimbra’s objectives for 2009 and beyond: continue growing our customer base and revenues, raise customer satisfaction even higher, firmly establish Zimbra as the leading open collaboration platform for businesses, governments, academic institutions and service providers, and finally deliver more than 3/4ths of our revenue and services through our channel partners.

To our existing partners: We want to say again we greatly appreciate everything we’ve done together already and believe the best is yet to come!  We are already getting positive feedback, including Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix hosting who said, “We’re really excited to be a Zimbra Gold Partner. Positive customer feedback about our solution plus more resources from Zimbra combine to enable us to better sell the product to our target market.”

For those interested in partnering with Zimbra to resell, implement or host Zimbra, we look forward to hearing from you soon!

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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[Update: Please note the original post date of April 1st --we're just kidding-- enjoy! ] 

Zimbra leads the world in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software for Linux and Mac OS X servers. In fact, we recently passed the 40 million paid mailbox milestone. As we have grown, the question often asked is: “When will Zimbra extend its platform support to a given operating system?” Given the success of Zimbra Desktop on Linux, Mac, and Windows – we felt that a server version for Windows as was the next logical choice.

Obviously there are several hurdles going from a Linux environment to Windows, all of the third party applications we rely on need to have freely available cross-platform versions. We’ve partnered with OpenLDAP team, who have stepped up to provide an compatibility patch for a Microsoft Active Directory emulation mode. Combined with a new mail transfer agent written from the ground up, we’re pleased to bring you: Zimbra Collaboration Suite for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

This isn’t the first time we’ve switched a package in favor of our own custom code – in Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 we threw out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch. Replacing Postfix has been the major hurdle for a while now; the engineering team knew that it would be a daunting task.

I already do a lot of my dev work in Eclipse & IntelliJ on Windows. Previously we put PowerShell wrappers around our command line tools to assist more advanced admins. Now we’ve utilized MSI technology to provide the easiest install of a mail server ever. — Anand Palaniswamy, Server Team Lead

This extends Zimbra’s reach of services to the most widely deployed operating systems in the world – theoretically any Windows product; though XP, Vista and 7 will not be officially supported on the Network Edition since they don’t have the same long-term backing by Microsoft development teams. Editions tested by our quality assurance group cover the major versions of Windows Server 2008 including Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, HPC (high-performance computing cluster), Web Server, Small Business, Essential Business, and Foundation Server adaptations; in both x86 & x86_64-bit variants. We hope that the community will step up to cover Itanium based processors.

For the future, the server team is working to integrate Zimbra’s Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with Windows Storage Server, for moving messages and attachments from a primary to a secondary volume based on the age of the message; which lets you to store less frequently accessed data on cheaper disks. Of note, the updates to junctions, reparse points, and symbolic links in recent NTFS versions allows us to do single-instance-storage as well.

We’re playing with .NET access for our SOAP interfaces in the labs. It’s potential is very impressive. — Kevin Henrikson, UI Team Lead

The compatibility with Windows will enable a large, new market for our HSP & VAR partners. To quote Jim Morrisroe, VP of the Zimbra Business Unit here at Yahoo: “It is key to delivering on our strategy and commitment to provide the best experience for users and administrators of any messaging platform in the market today. This launch enables us to sell to 2 million new small businesses and enterprises that view Microsoft server technology as integral to their success.”

ZCS version 5.0.15 for Windows platforms is now available on both the Open Source and Network Edition download pages. The Network Edition will be classified as beta until ZCS 6.0 is released – and will then contain the same product support as well as subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. If you have any questions please contact our Windows sales team.

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See the ZimbraWindows directory alternative to ZimbraServer in each branch of our public perforce cache for relevant files and build definitions. Try it out – you can leave us feedback thoughts below or over in the Community Forums.

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!