Zimbra

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.)

 

This week, Zimbra held a Zimbra Administration Course at the Yahoo! headquarters in Santa Clara. For those who don’t know, the administration course covers just about everything in Zimbra from A to Z.

I had the opportunity to lead the first two days of the basic/general sessions of the training course. Attendee’s learned everything from Installation and upgrades to Java Garbage Collection and Disaster Recovery.

We like to play a game during training called “stump the chump”, where attendee’s who stump me get t-shirts. Attendees also get to keep all the training materials, and exclusive access to a special training forum called “Camp Zimbra.

The Third day is the advanced course, and it was led by Anup P. Anup is a Zimbra Service Engineer who has a ton of Large Deployment experiences under his belt. He led the Third day covering things like performance graph generation, and cluster-specific options and questions.

Congratulations to the Zimbra Admin Class of June 2008 from all of us at Zimbra!

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If you’re interested in when a Zimbra Training will be available for your region, or when the next one will be available, check out our Zimbra Training Page.

Yeah, so do I…. But I’m not eligible, and you are! We’re giving away this MacBook Air to promote Zimbra Desktop, a revolutionary new e-mail client built on the Zimbra Web Client. Here’s how you can get it.

Since I first started using Zimbra Desktop last year, it has grown on me. I just can’t live without it.

With each release, we add the most requested features that our users want. Whether using GMail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, or even just an IMAP server, you can keep all of your mail in the same place. So why would you do that? Well, not only do you get the power of Zimlets, but you can run the same client regardless of Operating System. You can Build it from source, and it’s free!

My favorite part? I like playing with JSP tag libraries and making Zimbra do funny (and sometimes stupid) things. You can hack Zimbra Desktop all up the way you want it, and not have to worry about messing up the server (more on hacking Zimbra Desktop, later). The UI is completely open, and separate from where the data is stored. It really makes an ideal test ground for those admins who want to customize the Zimbra Web Client and test it first.

Matt Asay (of cnet) says, “Slick, powerful, and much more extensible than Microsoft ever dreamed of being.” So just how slick is it gonna get? Well (without giving too much away), we’re building in “the coolest thing ever” and some other “most requested” features.

So, download Zimbra Desktop and register to win a Free MacBook Air:
http://www.zimbra.com/yahoo_zimbra_desktop/index.html

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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Times have been busy for us here @ Zimbra. We have been working to get some cool stuff into 5.0.3, and some other cool stuff that we’ll blog about later. In the mean time, Zimbra’s been nominated for the a Webware top 100 award.

Who do you think should win?

If you’re a Zimbra fan, show us you love us. Click to vote.:)
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We’re going to be all over the place this month. Here’s a few events that we hope you can attend!

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2007 was the best year for Zimbra yet. We thought we would take a moment to recap the great things that happened this year. Here are the events that were big milestones for us.

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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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