Our friends at Smartsheet have just posted a new Zimlet application tab in the Gallery that looks very promising; we have a few uses in mind already for our team and internal Zimbra deployment. Here is a summary they kindly provided:
Manage Any Kind of Work with the Smartsheet Zimlet
Add the Smartsheet tab to your Zimbra solution and manage your projects, sales pipelines and crowdsourcing solutions as easily as you manage your Calendar. Smartsheet puts a familiar spreadsheet-like face on a flexible work automation engine. Integration Overview
Smartsheet is integrated with the following Zimbra features:
Calendar - view key project dates in your Zimbra calendar or key Zimbra calendar dates in your Smartsheet project calendar
Contacts - import Zimbra contacts into Smartsheet for streamlined sharing with colleagues and other collaborators
Briefcase - attach files from your Zimbra Briefcase to any row in Smartsheet
Email - receive Smartsheet notifications and reminders via email
The Smartsheet Zimlet is now available in the Zimbra Gallery. Or watch the brief demo video below for more information.
More About Spreadsheet
Work projects often begin their life as a spreadsheet (e.g. sales pipelines, marketing events, research projects, product plans, candidate tracking,…) that gets emailed around to be updated.
Often, this approach falls short, and companies then invest money and training in converting to a software specific to Project Management, CRM, Marketing Automation, HR, etc. To the millions of Zimbra users – keep the spreadsheet layout you like and gain the additional automation you need. Smartsheet gives you a familiar, flexible spreadsheet interface and enables you to:
Attach any file or Zimbra Briefcase item to any row
Create multiple levels of sub-tasks
Track threaded discussion on any row
See your sheet in Calendar and Gantt views
Set Alerts and Notification on any row that keep you abreast of changes happening
Get discrete updates on pieces of your sheet via email
Get a consolidated report across many sheets
It’s the perfect union between spreadsheets, project tools and file sharing sites.
We’re excited to announce that Zimbra support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 (BES 5.0) will be generally available with the release of Zimbra Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 6.5 (ZCB 6.5) in the first half of Q4. For companies that want a better alternative to frustrating traditional email platforms, Zimbra is the first alternative to offer full support for the latest BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
ZCB 6.5 will add platform support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express 5.0, providing native synchronization of mail, address book, calendar and tasks in BlackBerry devices. ZCB 6.5 will also provide support for Windows Server 2008 (32- and 64-bit).
Last month, we opened up the ZCB 6.5 Beta Program and received tremendous interest from customers of all shapes and sizes — from SMBs with 25 mailbox deployments to enterprise customers and hosting partners with 50,000+ mailbox deployments. The feedback we are receiving from customers participating in the ZCB 6.5 Beta Program is extremely positive and really shows us how great the demand is for BES 5.0 support.
Here’s what our customer Thomas Klaube, CTO of Ertel & Friends Multimedia GmbH had to say: “Our employees are often on-the-go and need full-featured mobile access to collaboration tools, so we are really excited that Zimbra is leading the way in support for the latest BlackBerry platform. We joined the ZCB 6.5 Beta Program and were up and running in no time.”
Zimbra is committed to continued support of the latest and greatest BlackBerry platforms and we’re really thrilled to be the first alternative email and collaboration platform to offer customers native integration with BES 5.0 and BES Express 5.0.
VMworld is just around the corner, and not only is it VMware’s most important event of the year, it’s also shaping up to be big for Zimbra too. We will be exhibiting with our new organization for the first time, showing off the new Zimbra Appliance and talking a lot more about the future of Zimbra and VMware together.
On the later point, we also want to provide an opportunity for attendees and customers in the general vicinity to hear about the Zimbra roadmap and provide us directional feedback away from the bustle of the show floor. As such we are having an Advisory Meeting and breakfast on Wednesday September 1st. The meeting is offsite at the W Hotel, so both show attendees and non-attendees are welcome.
Topics will include ZCS 7.0 features, Zimbra Appliance and Zimbra Desktop plus a round table discussion with the Zimbra product leadership team.
Date: Wednesday September 1, 2010
Time: 8am – 10am
Location: W Hotel, San Francisco
Space is limited and breakfast will be served, please RSVP to confirm your space and room location to: events@zimbra.com.
Also – for those planning on attending VMworld please remember the Tech Exchange where you can learn about Zimbra APIs, building Zimlets and more from the Zimbra product and development teams.
Please note if you cannot make the Advisory this time we will continue to host more in the future at major events!
The Zimbra Appliance is our first major step post acquisition to integrate Zimbra and VMware products and provide a simplified IT experience for administrators and their users. We have spent the last 5 months speaking with VMware and Zimbra customers and re-affirming their need for a simplified collaboration software stack that embraces the IT Platform of the future.
The call for simplicity reflects changes in the overall IT landscape driven by the evolution of user, administrator and datacenter requirements – many of these inspired by events in the consumer market. Whether it is the simplicity of the Amazon Kindle, the open platform of Facebook or the cross platform support of Twitter, users and administrators expect applications to be easier to use and deliver than ever before.
Here is a summary of market drivers influencing the launch of Zimbra Appliance:
User:
Users want applications to be available on any device, anywhere and anytime. These applications need to be available using traditional desktop clients and via the browser. The collaboration cloud is a hub for communications: regardless of device, the user has the context he needs to make decisions — like what flights to take, which purchase orders to accept/reject, or what information should be synced with the CRM system. Additionally, users want to be able to share information with co-workers, partners and other external users. Ted Schadler at Forrester recently wrote about this need to empower users.
Based on these needs and core to the Zimbra Appliance is our support for Zimbra Desktop, an offline cache of the user’s collaboration cloud, and our browser-based support for desktop, touchpad and mobile browsers. Additionally, we continue our support for legacy email clients (Microsoft Outlook) and a wide range of mobile devices (iPhone, Android and BlackBerry).
Administrator:
Administrators’ requirements have also changed and now require a simpler application stack that is easier to deploy, manage and update. Administrative innovations from companies like Saleforce.com and Successfactors have made it easier to deploy, manage and update applications that provide web-based administration tools and a complete software stack (application, operating system and update tools).
As part of offering a collaboration cloud as a complete software bundle, administrators are able to deploy the Zimbra Appliance in under 10 minutes. Beyond a quick set up, the Zimbra Appliance provides administrative tools for self-service, auto update, security policy control and the ability to remotely wipe a mobile device wipe.
Datacenter:
The last key change in the IT market that is driving simplification is that organizations want to deploy applications in a private or public cloud. In order to maximize flexibility and drive down the total cost of ownership, applications need to be portable and provide support for standards-based virtualization (OVF) and cross platform back up tools.
The Zimbra team has worked closely with hosting providers like Hosting.com and Contegix as well as many small businesses to make sure that the Appliance can be easily moved from private to personal clouds. Additionally, the Zimbra Appliance supports VMware’s Data Recovery so that administrators can manage multiple applications with a common back up and recovery tool.
This is just the first step on our efforts to integrate with other VMware products and continue our mission is to simplify IT and to provide a collaboration cloud that can run anywhere. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.
Check out a video of the Zimbra Appliance for more information:
Posted in Community, News by Zimbra Team on August 3rd, 2010
We’re excited to be part of our first VMworld, where we’ll take center stage to showcase Zimbra products.
August 30-September 2 at Moscone Center, San Francisco
October 12-14, Bella Center, Copenhagen
VMworld is a great chance to keep up on the latest technology trends, with over 300 different breakout sessions and labs on topics like leveraging the cloud, virtualizing enterprise applications and managing the desktop as a service. It is also a great opportunity to meet with knowledge experts or join group discussions with peers and industry experts. And, you’ll hear presentations from VMware leaders along with outside guest speakers. Plus you won’t want to miss the band. Last year was Foreigner, can you guess who it is this time? (Hints: + 30 million records; 7 top Billboard hits).
Below is a list of the Zimbra activities that we have planned. If you have not already signed-up and you would like to attend this year’s event, click on any of the links below to get to the registration pages. We hope that you can join us at VMworld 2010! Sessions
Breakout Speakers:
“Lessons from the Cloud: How Application Clouds Are Evolving to Meet New End User, Administrator and Datacenter Trends” – John Robb PC8326
“Zimbra and The Future for Mission Critical Apps in the Virtualized Enterprise” – Jon Dybik EA8210
Posted in News, Partners by Donna Kuker on July 22nd, 2010
Telenet, one of the largest internet providers in Belgium, recently announced the rollout of a new webmail platform developed in collaboration with Zimbra. Since April 2010, Telenet has been providing access to the new system for over 1 million residential internet subscribers and will continue the migration through August 1st. The updated email suite – which is free to Telenet customers – provides 5 GB of storage, a built-in calendar and address book, many advanced tools like sharing, automated importing of external mail accounts, plus more features to come.
Previously, Telenet internet customers had a basic mail utility and minuscule quota space of 50 MB. The new interface, powered by Zimbra, is extremely user friendly and is supported by 100x more storage. Other improved features include the ability to set up rules for filtering incoming mail and access to a mobile browser version. Several factors, including lower disk costs and the broadening availability of both virtualization and cloud applications made it possible for Telenet to make this update available to its customers. (One such distributed object storage framework is from Bizanga/Scality, who developed a connector for Zimbra, and has a video on Telenet’s strategy here.)
According to Saskia Schatterman, Executive Vice President Residential Marketing, no less than 70% of their customers use Telenet email on a regular basis and just over half report that account is their primary address. Those customers can now send mail anywhere, from any device with Internet access; putting aside the need to also use alternatives like Hotmail or Gmail. With this cutting-edge webmail architecture, Telenet can provide all of their broadband customers with a sophisticated and full featured product, that’s still simple to use.
The rollout of the advanced Telenet email platform is phased, all existing internet customers will automatically be granted access to the new communication suite and will be notified once their mailbox has been transitioned. Brand-new users will receive access to the Zimbra webmail client by default.
With this integration Zimbra continues to deliver on its promise of providing hassle-free collaboration solutions to our partners around the world. We look forward to sharing news about additional international organizations in the coming months.
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).
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.
Exchange
Zimbra
Users
3,100
13,700
FTEs
3.2
2.2
User/FTE
969
6,227
Per User Cost
$7.5
$3
Above: Penn admin resource distribution and resulting monthly per-user costs charged back to departments
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!
Posted in Community, News by Greg Armanini on March 19th, 2010
By last count, there are roughly 25 current openings in team Zimbra. Better yet we’re looking to add talent across the board: developers (UI, client, server), QA, support, sales, marketing, biz dev, channel, professional services, you name it. So many in fact, it quickly starts to sound like a droning list of names in an Oscars acceptance speech (and rest assured we probably forgot to mention at least one functional role too).
