Zimbra

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.

Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The position will be responsible for developer events, training, documentation and ensuring that developers have all they need to make use of the rich APIs Zimbra offers.

- Our forum with over 27,000 members http://www.zimbra.com/forums/

- Our company/developer blog http://blog.zimbra.com/

- Our developer and admin wiki http://wiki.zimbra.com/

- Our public bug database http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/

- Our public community driven roadmap http://pm.zimbra.com/

- Our web mash-up extensions (zimlet) gallery http://gallery.zimbra.com/

You can apply directly on the job posting here:

http://careers.yahoo.com/jdescription.php?oid=24060

If you have more questions of have someone in mind who you think would be a good fit please feel free to email me.

KevinH at Zimbra.com

-kevin

As a long-time Zimbra developer and employee, I’ve spent countless hours each week using Zimbra email.  I love the overall experience, especially because I have been able to tailor it to my personal style using Zimlets.  They are easy to create and over time I have built quite a few.  So without further ado, the following is the first of a 5 post series featuring new Zimlets which I think are incredibly useful and empower Zimbra users.

Zimlet 1: Attach Emails

Every so often I miss the ability to easily to attach an earlier email while composing an new email message.  This Zimlet does just that, it adds an “Attach Email” tab in the Attachments dialog in Mail Compose. Once you click on the Email tab you can search for emails that you want to attach or just scroll the list. You can even ‘browse’ for emails by clicking on the folder tree.  Finally, something I really like is with any of these methods you can also select multiple emails and attach them simultaneously.

Here is how it works… assume you are composing or replying to an email and now you want to attach some earlier email…

1. Click on the Add Attachment Button

2. Click on the Attach Mail tab

3. Search or browse for emails (in this case below I’m looking in the Sent folder)

4. Select the email(s) you want to attach – ctrl to select multiple.

5. Click Attach button

You can repeat these steps again if you want for more emails or other attachment types.

Note – you need ZCS 5.0.15 and above or 6.x to use this Zimlet.

Next post… Ignoring Conversations.

It may sound odd offering more Zimbra installation advice since there is a lot on the subject in other blogs, our documents, wiki and Forums. In fact, some quick research surfaced over 1.4 million hits for Zimbra server install on the web and 36,000 on the Zimbra site alone.

But we are also fortunate to have more new Zimbra users than ever, and after helping some trial customers recently, it was a good reminder a few simple tips can help cut through some noise and avoid time-consuming snags once you start the install process. So without further ado here are the top 6 common pre-requisites to consider when preparing for your Zimbra installation:

1. Firewall
Servers have firewalls configured once the operating systems are installed for security purposes. Our recommendation is to temporarily disable the firewall on the system during a single and multi-server Zimbra installation. An alternative would be to refer to our installation guide to get a list of ports (see Table 1) used by the application and make sure the ports are open prior to installation.

2. DNS setup
All Zimbra configurations store hostnames. We do not have save any IP address information in our configuration. The advantage is this allows an administrator to change IP address (more likely) on the Zimbra system without having to perform any application changes.

This scenario means that all the hostnames to be used in a Zimbra installation have to be defined in DNS. Both A and Mx records for the hostnames and email domains need to be defined and verified prior to beginning your installation.

One other thing to consider is split DNS configuration if you are dealing with servers separated by a firewall.

3. Use of Fully Qualified Hostnames (FQDN)
It is crucial to use a Fully Qualified hostname during the Zimbra configuration. For example, you should enter server1.domain.com instead of server1. This avoids incorrect DNS address lookups and ensures that the client would be connecting to the right application.

4. Port Conflicts
Standard server configuration comes with support for numerous services like POP, IMAP and HTTP (see Table 1). These services are also installed with the Zimbra Network Edition. Therefore, you want to make sure you disable all these services prior to installation. The Zimbra installation scripts will check for any of these port conflicts and notify you to turn these services off before continuing.

5. Libraries and additional packages
Zimbra’s rich feature sets are dependent on additional packages being installed on the system. These packages vary between Linux and Mac Operating system. The Zimbra installation script does perform checks to verify all the dependencies have been met, but going through the System Requirements documentation (available on the Zimbra website) before will save you some time.

STORAGE CALCULATION EXAMPLE
(Based on ‘Mailbox Usage of 200 MB’ and 500 users)

+ User Data: 500 users with 200 MB = 100 GB user data
+ MySQL data: 5% of 100 GB (User Data): 5 GB
+ Zimbra binaries: 10 GB
+ Zimbra logs: 20 GB
+ Zimbra indexes: 25% of 100GB (User Data) = 25 GB

SUBTOTAL: 100 + 5 + 10 + 20 + 25 = 160 GB
Backups: 160 % of Subtotal: 160 * 160% = 256 GB for backups
TOTAL: 160 + 256 = 416 GB

6. Sizing
Storage sizing is important for an excellent performing Zimbra application (see example). If you are doing a Network Edition trial you should contact the Zimbra technical team for sizing information for storage including number of disks, which Raid level to use, and the size of the drives to use. Configuration of the Zimbra store volume is important in satisfying the application IO requirements.

Remember, it’s also a good idea to review the Zimbra Quick Installation Guide where you can find this information and many more good tips.

Do you have a good tip to share? Feel free to add a comment!

One of the great things about being an open source company is that we have a passionate community that goes beyond the boundaries of any one location (Zimbra HQ, for example), with community members that participate and contribute from all over the globe.  We saw this early on with the help the community gave us for international translations,  and several of our early partners hailed from as far as South Africa, Brazil and Germany.

So in December when the Ministerio de Vivienda - the  Ministry of Housing in Lima, Peru - began looking for new options to replace their expensive proprietary software with lower-cost, open source alternatives, it came as no surprise that the open source community eventually led them to Software Libre Andino, a Zimbra / Red Hat distributor in Peru who helped replace their outdated systems with modern ones, including Zimbra for collaboration and Alfresco for document management.

The Ministerio de Vivienda, which is responsible for all the housing, construction and sewer systems in Peru, has a mission to improve access to adequate housing and basic services to all the citizens of Peru. Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in their decision to deploy open source solutions is they found that open platforms allow their users to easily integrate and build new solutions on top of this foundation.

In this case they were able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet created by Zimbra community members and allow a simple way for employees to store documents that are attached in email on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. Simple, inuitive integrations like these make it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs, instead of choosing proprietary options.

We love to hear stories of how Zimbra and open source technologies travel the globe – if you have any stories you want to share, drop us a line.

(Below: Save attachment to Alfresco and add an attachment to Zimbra from Alfresco).

Zimbra Gallery Pages:
Save in Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet Peru

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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With its 1.0 GA announcement this week, Zimbra Desktop is officially launched as an open source, full featured desktop mail client. I’d like to use this occasion to reflect back at an interesting approach that the Zimbra engineering team took in developing this product.

Zimbra Desktop behaves like a classic desktop application. It installs and runs on a user’s computer. Even though it’s designed to aggregate mail, calendar and address book data from many Web services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, it runs and interacts with user independent of any particular Web service. However for anyone who’s curious enough to take a peek under the hood, she will find Web oriented technology at every turn.

Using technology originally designed for the Web in desktop application development is not anything new, let alone unique. Both Microsoft and Adobe have been pushing for their brand of RIA (Rich Internet Application) platforms, namely Sliverlight and AIR, and I have seen quite a few desktop products built on one or the other. Of course Mozilla XUL based desktop applications like Thunderbird and Songbird have been around even longer. However what makes Zimbra Desktop a unique case is the engineering approach. We are developing two products, an enterprise server product and a desktop application, in lockstep in the same code base.

The enterprise server in this case is Zimbra Collaboration Suite Server. It is a carrier grade email collaboration server running at many Fortune 500 companies, universities and large Internet Service Providers. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) has support for many clients, including a state-of-the-art Ajax Web client. So what is the desktop application, Zimbra Desktop? In short, Zimbra Desktop is a special build of ZCS that installs the ZCS Server and the Ajax client on the same user computer, collapsing the client and server tiers into one. In terms of their designated roles, the two products can’t be more different. Using an analogy, if I were to claim that Exchange Server and Outlook client share more than 95% of the code between them, few people would believe me. But the equivalent is true in the case of ZCS and Zimbra Desktop.

We didn’t do this just to be cool. We did it for these benefits:

1) Code reuse – lower development cost
2) Code reuse – lower maintenance cost
3) Code reuse – lower user learning cost

The first two points are self evident. The third point about lower user learning cost is due to the fact that the Zimbra Desktop UI is virtually identical to that of the ZCS Ajax web client, so a user familiar with the ZCS Ajax UI doesn’t have to learn a new UI when running Zimbra Desktop. As a matter of fact many ZCS users are also Zimbra Desktop users, often switching between the two as they move between computers. Moreover, the high level of code overlap between the two products not only makes development cheaper but also brings innovation to market faster, because a new feature added to one is automatically available in the other in most cases.

Here is a component diagram of Zimbra Desktop.

At the core of Zimbra Desktop there lies the “micro edition” of the ZCS Server. The Ajax client talks to the local server in a way not much different from the online Ajax client to a real ZCS server. The most significant addition in Zimbra Desktop is the data synchronization engine, which synchronizes user data in the cloud with data on the local computer disk, making the data accessible even when there’s no network connectivity like during air travel.

Making ZCS Server run on a user computer is easy because a) it’s a Java application that can run on many OS platform, and b) it has enough tuning knobs built-in to be dialed down to support a user of one. The ZCS Web container is Jetty, also a product especially good at scaling up as well as scaling down.

One topic we can’t avoid in any discussion of Zimbra Desktop is its integrated browser, Mozilla Prism. Prism is a simple browser built on XULRunner in the same way as Firefox is a full featured browser built from the same code base. As a solution to render the Zimbra Desktop UI, there’s no more ideal fit than Prism as the ZCS Ajax client runs in Prism out of box, just like in Firefox. In addition, we also rely on Prism’s XPCOM layer and other native bindings for OS integration on Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms such as Ubuntu, to support features like pop-up notifications and “mailto” link handling. It’s plugin framework allows us to do things like add attachments to emails simply by dragging them from their desktop into the compose area, or upload files to briefcase in the same way. While Prism is a perfect choice for us in developing the hybrid online/offline solutions, I should point out that both Silverlight and AIR can work well for other products. In the case of Zimbra Desktop however, Prism and the underlying XULRunner allow us to best protect our investment in the UI.

Finally, a word on why we still choose to build a desktop application when many are moving in the opposite direction, from desktop to the Web. We believe there’s the need for a mail client to be independent of any Web services and to be under the total control of an end user. While there are now products like Google Gears to allow taking a Web application offline in a generic fashion, in the end a Web application can only offer limited ways for third party customization. Many users spend a good part of their work day with a mail client, so it’s very important to allow the freedom to extend the software to best suit each user’s unique needs to be productive. With Zimbra Desktop, the third party extension mechanism is called Zimlets. This is our standard framework to enable Web service mash-ups that adds additional functionality, like Web conferencing or Twittering, directly into the email application with tight integration. In Zimbra Desktop 1.0, Zimlets can be downloaded and injected by end users; in 1.1, our next major revision, we will provide a more seamless way for end users to explore and manage Zimlets.

With more than 2.4 million downloads, 7,500 forum posts and two years in the making it’s been a long road to this point… we are now happy to announce the general availability of Zimbra Desktop.

The free Windows, Mac, and Linux download is available now.

Century 21 agents spend many hours a day away from their reliable office network connections. The introduction of Zimbra Desktop allows us to continue reducing our dependence on Microsoft Outlook while retaining the superior Zimbra collaboration platform that we can now use wherever and whenever we need it. — Marge Patterson, Vice President CENTURY 21 Realty Group Companies

A lot of work and fine tuning has been done to create the best possible companion to the Zimbra AJAX Web experience, throughout that process your feedback has been invaluable!

For those less familiar, Zimbra Desktop is unique because it gives you centralized access to your Zimbra email inbox (or inboxes from virtually any external source)- plus your calendar, contacts, documents, tasks and briefcase- whether you are online or offline. We think it is the most advanced email application available, a hybrid combining the best qualities of traditional mail clients with a modern webmail experience, and the first to elegantly marry local and cloud storage so all communication information is at a user’s fingertips.

Since Zimbra Desktop supports any email account (plus contacts and calendars for Yahoo! and Google) we hope it’s the most convenient way to keep you organized and in touch with coworkers, friends and family. Additionally, with the latest Zimbra technologies, including faster indexed search, conversation views and tagging, you can easily handle large inboxes and quickly find important pictures, documents or messages from people you care about.

With Zimbra Desktop filling a big gap between free email applications with basic functionality and premium applications that may be cost prohibitive, we have seen a steady list of customers embrace the product, including Red Hat, Gyro International and 21st Century Realty Group. Zimbra Desktop gives their employees a better overall experience, provides offline “airplane mode” capabilities, works cross-platform and makes life easier for their IT departments by backing up end-user desktop data in the cloud.

Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer at Red Hat recently shared his impressions on Zimbra and Zimbra Desktop:

“We recently swapped out our legacy email and calendar systems for Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which has received high marks throughout the company, and with the general availability of Zimbra Desktop, we can now offer all of our employees a sleek solution for both Web-based and desktop communication. We are especially pleased that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is based on open source technology and that it performs very effectively in our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”

We have always been dedicated to offering our customers freedom of choice to meet your diverse collaboration needs for work, school, or home, and Zimbra Desktop brings your most important communications to you in one place, wherever you are. Zimbra Desktop is free for anyone to use whether you are a Zimbra customer or not. (Zimbra customers have an additional benefit of support from us when using Zimbra Desktop with a Zimbra email account).

Download Zimbra Desktop today and take your email, calendar, and contacts with you on any plane, train, or automobile!

Few things get our community excited like a major release version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Today marks availability of the first GnR preview: ZCS 6.0 Beta 1 Open Source Edition. Admins and developers can find it over on the downloads page, for the less technically inclined we’ll also have a new hosted demo up shortly.

Some feature highlights:

» A new horizontal ‘three panel’ view with the message on the right.

» There are now tabs for individual messages as well as the compose page.

» Document & Briefcase access from the standard HTML client.

» Share management & discovery UI that lets you see all shares (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, docs, etc) at a glance. Join a distribution list late? Find all existing shares with the group.

» The ability to run existing email filters over the contents of a folder.

» Did you get it? Know instantly, as read receipts have been implemented in the web-client.

» Improved calendar resource auto-accept/decline conflict handling.

» Calendar fisheye view – previously in Zimbra Desktop, now in ZCS.

  » Auto-updating RSS feeds & ICS event URLs on a configurable schedule.

  » Per-user blacklists & whitelists are exposed in the revamped mail preferences area.

» ‘Published’ Zimlets management for end users in options. (Zimlets themselves can now define a new application or preferences tab.)

» Mobile web-client overhauls: Including a special mini logon page, better appointment creation, and six new variants based on device type and connection speed.

» Auto-complete from shared address books; and recently used contacts are presented first.

» Configurable spell check on every send.

» On-behalf-of aka sendAs option on compose in shared folders/relationship accounts.

» Appointment list view & refined print layouts.

» Full featured detached message view for the advanced AJAX client.

» Attach files during mail compose directly from the briefcase; in the briefcase UI you can now send as attachments or links.

» Pressure-based scrolling of folder and message list (within the same page).

» OpenLDAP now allows for some on-the-fly configuration changes with zmlocalconfig via a cn=config backend instead of slapd.conf text files for preservation across upgrades.

» GALsync accounts via datasource contact folders with sorting, browsing, and enhanced client usability.

» MySQL as the logger DB has been removed, in favor of more zmstat service implementation mixed with SQLite & RRD for the new logger service.

» Role based delegated permissions on every individual feature. Now you can create distribution list managers, while HSP’s can give someone permission to manage multiple domains from one login. (The network edition will include easy admin console configuration; open source edition may contain some code.)