Several events going on this week. Satish, John and Greg will be at VMWorld where Satish will take part in tomorrow’s keynote. Later this week at ISPCon I’ll be on a panel – What the Web 2.0?. Last but not least Satish will be back on the main stage at Web 2.0. For those who missed it last year; Zimbra launched at Web 2.0.
Just a quick post on my new MacBook Pro that arrived yesterday. Definitely *fast*. The Firefox Intel build (I picked up here) screams.
Want a new iMac? Well all you need to do is write a killer Zimlet and enter our Zimlet Competition. We’ll be posting some additional how-to’s including setting up a developer environment on a Win32 PC for those who don’t have a Linux server at their disposal. We’ll also walk through a couple simple Zimlets to get a feel for the structure and capabilities of the Zimlet framework. For those of you who want to get started today you can read the Zimlet Whitepaper or for just take a look at the code from some existing Zimlets.
We’ve now opened a Zimbra Wiki. We’ve started populating it with common questions and trying to point forums questions to that. Please feel free to add to this Wiki and or correct mistakes that you see. This should provide a more consistent and easy to use documentation and FAQ.
Thanks to Dave for the first external contribution.
So in the last month, the Zimbra engineers have been flooded with emails and phone calls from recruiters offering them jobs. This is very flattering. For two reasons, one its flattering because in the valley there are so many hot companies and so many hot engineers – but I guess Zimbra is now the breeding ground for talent. Second, as soon as these messages arrive – our engineers forward it around and are not tempted to leave a small fantastic startup to go work for a big company especially ones where recruiters blindly spam everyone. The latest rounds of recruiting spam to our engineers came from Mark Jennings who has a microsoft email address and there have been numerous recruiting calls from Google as well….
So that brings us to how we got the talent that we have and how we retain them. First – very high standards in recruiting, very tough interview process and, most importantly, word of mouth (no recruiters). Second, at Zimbra you work with the best and the brightest and are challenged everyday – its an honor to come to work everyday. Third, its the chance to lead a revolution in computing. Here we find ourselves at the crossroads of an internet revolution again – and in some small but definite way Zimbra is leading at least one battle. Finally, this is a fun culture – we definitely work hard and play harder and we all know each other personally as well as professionally. So that all brings us back to this question of how long before we start losing people…. I think we will lose people for one reason alone – we grow too big and our culture starts sucking (I won’t be here then either). But we will lose people to other startups, to new startups as I am confident that the kinds of people we have here at Zimbra have no interest at all in being in a company where they don’t influence the culture, direction and product strategy. They are all entrepreneurs by heart …..
The new end user flash demo has been posted on the web site. This version features:
* Enterprise mashups: Skype and Google maps
* Calendar drag and drop, sashing
* Delegated & shared calendars
* RSS feeds
Additionally, the core functionality modules have been updated to highlight new features in the latest release.
You can download an offline zip of the latest demo here.
One of our community member’s FunkyPenguin posted a zimbra group on Frapper. Let’s you report where Zimbra is being used. Have you installed Zimbra or are using it. Post your location. Let’s see just how far around the world Zimbra has traveled.
Don’t have time to download the latest release? You can see it now on our hosted demo
We have been quite happy with the response thus far to the name Zimbra. Hopefully, Zimbra is growing on you the same way it’s been growing on us.
The name Zimbra comes to us from Talking Heads’ (our choice for best band of the 80s) tune “I Zimbra“, which can be found on Fear of Music (which ought, by the way, to be in your collection). Zimbra alone, of the thousands of names that we considered, came out of a desperate late night search through the CD collection to head off alternative names like HobNob, AquaFront, and Oompa Zing. (We’re use failed company names for our conference rooms, and there’s no possibility of our ever running out.)
Zimbra came to the Heads via Dadaism, which Wikipedia defines in part as a “protest against an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.” Hugo Ball, a Dadaistic poet, wrote a nonsensical poem—Gadji beri bimba—just for the sound of it, and then Talking Heads made poem into song.
Zimbra apparently also means “Juniper” in Portuguese, but the term doesn’t seem to be in very common use. (At least, my Brazilian friends hadn’t heard of it.)
But we figured all that stuff out after the fact. The reality is that we just like the sound of Zimbra, and admittedly several of us still love the Heads.
I think to date naming may have been the single hardest thing the company formerly known as Liquid Systems has had to get done. Naming is hard, because
• It’s one thing nearly every employee and perspective community member cares passionately about;
• You have to endeavor to avoid collisions with many thousands of commercial software products (since every man or woman and his/her dog can have a commercial software product);
• You also have to endeavor to avoid collisions with 100,000+ open source projects;
• You need something that anyone can easily spell once they’ve heard it (I learned this lesson the hard way—“Tengah” was at one time the name for the WebLogic Server); and
• Of course, you need to be able to get the URL and trademark (both of which would have been challenging if we’d tried to keep the name Liquid).
Looking forward, however, there’s one part of naming that we still haven’t sorted: What do we call the members of the greater Zimbra community?
• Zimbrainians
• Zimbracans
• Zimbradors
• Zimbrashers
Your vote or additional contributions would be most welcome on this blog thread.
