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.

---

JJ Zhuang is lead developer for Zimbra Desktop.

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!

---

Help us spread the spread the word – put a Zimbra Desktop badge on your website.

 

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.)

---

There are just too many enhancements to list here so we could only cover a few; check out the beta on a test server, then let us know what you think below or over in the Community Forums. Release notes are here. (Note: We advise against upgrading if using the Posix/Samba or Disclaimer add-ons, the process will be documented shortly.) This is the first release of several in our testing cycle; general availability of ZCS 6.0 is targeted for the summer.

Update: Please note the original date- April Fools Day – –we’re just kidding– enjoy!   We do not have a Windows Version of Zimbra server.  If you want to run Zimbra Collaboration Suite server on Windows, we recommend using Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance!

---

Here is a link to the Zimbra Appliance news release:

Zimbra Appliance: Your Collaboration Cloud To Deploy Anywhere

If you are an end user and want to have a cool email and collaboration client for your Windows Desktop, you can always download the Zimbra Desktop — it works with any email account (and Twitter and Facebook)!

Zimbra DESKTOP

(more…)

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!

There have been alphas and betas. We took all the benefits of a rich AJAX web-client into the offline application world (including fast search, platform independence, and mash-ups, in addition to drag-n-drop; for both the client navigation and in uploading of files from your desktop). People have told us we started a revolution in local access to mail, calendar, tasks, documents, and briefcase items when we introduced full sync with Zimbra accounts. I’m inclined to agree – but we also knew it was about freedom of your data, regardless of where it might be stored, so we expanded Zimbra Desktop to work with more providers than a Swiss Army knife has tools.

Zimbra’s been in the offline world for 2 years, and we’ve got an impressive roadmap of desktop features lined up that’s about to rock the collaboration world weather you take it on a plane, train, rv, or boat. Release candidate 1 is a feature complete product for the planned 1.0 general availability release, and includes many bug fixes since the packed beta 5. This version is also the first release that is available to be included in our support program for our network edition customers; those interested should contact their sales rep to participate.

Our desktop releases have been churned out roughly every three months, and many are just so excited for new updates that we decided to implement an early-adopters upgrade program as well. Your given the option to participate in the testing network by checking a box during the last screen of installation:

One click, and your desktop is now on the fast track to receive our same internal upgrade pushes. They aren’t true “nighties” per-say, but we hope to release updates in the week to month range after a little quality assurance.

Download it via auto-update, build from source, or for those just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time: You can grab the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

---

Have an idea for extending Zimbra? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.

Version 5.0.12 of our collaboration suite is now available for download!

Some enhancements of note for admins:

• 33358 – Postfix policy on validating RCPT TO content for minimizing backscatter spam for alias domains. (postfix_enable_smtpd_policyd)
• 33720 – By mapping alias to real domains we can allow auth with alias domain addresses and send out-of-office notifications for alias domains. (zimbraDomainAliasTargetId)

For users:

• 34751 – Avoid unnecessary appointment blob access for calendar summary viewing to produce faster cal tab loading.
• 6082 – Notification for delegate stores/shared folders.

Pushing change notifications to the UI eliminates the need for manual refreshes. An excellent thing as we approach simultaneous editing of the same document.

---

Zimbra Desktop meanwhile will be leaving beta 5 for the release candidate stage later this month. With a new early-adopters upgrade program as well; I know many of you testers are excited for a faster release pace.

We had a Mac oriented year-in-review, but some have asked “what about those of use who aren’t apple fanboys?” So as the holidays become a distant memory of nothing more than food, friends, and family; thought we’d take a 2nd moment to look back at community contributions and other happenings of 2008.

What seems like only a little while ago, we posted on our 10,000th forum member, and just two months thereafter we hit 11,000. We promise not to post stats every few thousand registrations, but these are just so staggering:

• Sept 2005: We started the forums.
• Nov  2006:  5k Members
• Sept 2007: 10K Members
• Nov  2007: 11K Members
• Dec  2008: 20K Members

In simple math, that’s almost double (x1.7) our growth rate over the past year. In that same time period the amount of posts and threads have also skyrocketed.

The fact that so many active members stick around to contribute and help their brethren on topics ranging from administration to development plus everything in-between, continues to amaze, impress, and makes us proud. Zimbra is clearly about something more – giving back, enhancing, and shaping the future of communication.

Seems more of you need to subscribe to the blog though (visits vs subscriptions) but I digress – hint: There’s a box on the right ;)

As our organization turns five, and our community three we just wanted to echo one more giant thank you. Your feedback and ideas are what keeps us pushing the limits of collaboration. We couldn’t do it without you.

Often hitting over 600 new registrations a month, and pushing close to 120,000 posts – the forums are so busy we thought we’d give you a little update, just in-case you haven’t had the opportunity to take it all in!

Here’s a bit of the highlights from the past year:

 
Going Mobile

Some excellent contributors have stepped up to make Open Source mobile synchronization for contacts, calendaring, and tasks a reality.

It’s may seem like a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart, but you can checkout the Funambol thread or find more info here. (Special thanks to Hillman, Wolfroma & Costa-101)

Want just open source push mail? You can find directions over in this wiki.

We’ve made our Java based ZimbraME client open source. Get the code from our public perforce cache, then modify & combile it for your needs. It will build and run on just about any phone that runs J2ME. You can also download one of our pre-compiled releases – including one for BlackBerry devices.

Too daring for your taste? The two mobile web-client cousins (main & mainx) are also available in complete open source and work in just about every browser. They provide excellent JSP tag lib examples for making your own portals or quick optimized client – they have all sorts of uses. (We promise more info on creating these home tab portals is coming shortly.)

 
Community Builds

We’ve added an amazing team of OpenSource Buildmasters that put out community builds for Ubuntu 8 32/64-bit (now an official release), Solaris 9 & 10, Mac OS X 10.4 PPC, OpenSUSE, and even FreeBSD – yes you didn’t misread that list.

(Dijichi2, Osmedts, and many more have done an excellent job!)
 
Mail-Clients
 

 
There’s always those that love their favorite thick-client so much we’d have to pry it from their cold dead hands. For Thunderbird fans Zindus has taken ZCS<>Thunderbird sync for personal AND shared contacts to a whole new level. (Thank you lmj!)

 

Zimbra Desktop builds have been packed with new content that you’re just going to have to read all the blog entries on Beta 5, Beta 4 & Beta 3. It’s not just about ZCS Sync anymore, ZD is here to help you connect with multiple major providers. We’re in the process of joining multiple repositories to bring it to the masses easier. Plus it’s a perfect testbed for quickly developing new themes or Zimlets without installing an entire test server. There’s even a community developed Solaris port by SivaSSKumar available here.


Tools, Extensions, & Zimlets

- Pbruna built ZimbraNotify, a Linux Toaster equivalent.

- Samba & Posix extensions now come pre-bundled.

- Deugenin developed an extension for global email footers!

Zimlets Galore: From the self backup ideas of StarXpert & Fbackup, to user-managed resource & location control from the ZWC, plus a whole slew of excellent collaboration tools – you can find a whole lot more Zimlets in the gallery. (And “Zimlet Month” is coming up fast.)

 
Other Cool Stuff

The new DnD Zimlet & FF extension allows you to to simply drag attachments from your desktop into you web-client’s mail compose window or briefcase. We plan to make this cross-browser/multi-platform using Yahoo’s BrowserPlus in the future, and in ZCS 6.0 we can alert you to new mail on your desktop – or even read your mails back to you out loud.

We’ve honed our CalDAV & free-busy interop calendaring with participation in multiple CalConnect roundtables.

The developer section of the forums is abound with stuff from an AJAX ticker on the login page, to perl access modules, and not one but two a interesting methods for individual and global read receipts.

Integrate Zimbra into your favorite browser in the form of mail/appointment notices, a toolbar, or make your daily ZCS interactions more useful with things like FF3’s new protocol handlers. Plus WebDav has so many uses that people are only starting to discover.

There’s also 1, 2, 3 reasons you have no excuse to not be backing up – more here, and we made it so simple that even users can do it. And some recent HA ideas if you’re not one for DRBD or some other favorites.

 
Forum Enhancements

The forum got a theme revamp, portable edition, and revised layouts.

Some new areas include:
* Specific product sections like Zimbra Desktop, Connector for Blackberry, and the J2ME phone client.
* A section dubbed ‘Camp Zimbra‘ for those who’ve completed official training and become ‘Alumni’.    
* Zimbra in Education gives our EDU professionals a opportunity to unite.
* An /etc lounge for general conversation.
There’s now one click access to Wiki Sandboxes – make yourself a reference guide or use it to troubleshoot.

And last but not least, we’ve increased the size of our awesome crew of volunteer moderators and regulars who give up their time to answer your admin and developer related questions everyday.

Thanks to all who visit the forums for making our community first rate!

---

If you haven’t kept up with Zimbra upgrades in a while we’re currently about to release ZCS 5.0.12 with more features than we could mention in a blog post – you can find a quick list via the product management portal. And we promise a few ZCS 6.0 teasers soon.

Every year, the Macworld Expo brings together a loyal and diverse base of Mac users which also happens to make up a core set of Zimbra’s customers. Once again this year you’ll find us at the show. We’re setting up house with 01.com (one of our many partners) at booth 4328 – we hope you can stop by and find out how Zimbra works seamlessly with Apple products at home or on the go. And if you can’t make it, take a look at our 2008 recap of Mac-related news, or visit http://www.zimbra.com/apple/ for more information.

December
Inquisitor, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in the Web browser, was acquired by Yahoo! and launched for Safari 3 in May, and then for Firefox 2 and 3, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in October. Last month, in the Desktop Beta 5 release, we launched built-in Inquisitor support for the search bar – bringing Zimbra users access to Inquisitor’s fast, smart and flexible search experience.

October
In October, Zimbra and Yahoo! hosted the CalConnect Roundtable, a symposium on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies, including iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV(3) standards. The meeting allowed us to collaborate with some big corporations including Apple, Google, Kerio, Microsoft and Sun, as well as some major universities to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

July
We love poker at Zimbra so with July we get to watch the world series and we get to play at our very own poker tables.  By mid-summer, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone arrived – bringing over-the-air synchronization to the native email, address book and calendar apps on any iPhone with 2.0 software and ZCS Network Edition with Zimbra Mobile enabled – just in time for loading up on the new iPhone 3G.

June
We’re always trying to find new ways to make the user experience faster, and this summer we put all the latest Web browsers to the test. We found Safari 3.3.1 to be the winner of the browser wars – an ideal companion to the Zimbra Web Client for the fastest collaboration experience yet.

February
In February, we launched a great improvement to Zimbra Collaboration Suite with our 5.0 release. In Zimbra’s traditionally inclusive style, we launched with support for Mac OS and for any mobile web browser, including the Apple iPhone. ZCS 5.0 also included the beta release of Zimbra Desktop, which gave all PC, Mac, and Linux machines the same rich Zimbra experience online and offline.

January
At MacWorld last year, we gave our Apple customers more to cheer about as we embraced support for Apple products and technologies, including Safari 3 and CalDAV for Mac OS X Leopard.

We look forward to 2009 and all the really cool stuff we are going to (very soon) launch.