Zimbra

[Update: Please note the original post date of April 1st --we're just kidding-- enjoy! ] 

Zimbra leads the world in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software for Linux and Mac OS X servers. In fact, we recently passed the 40 million paid mailbox milestone. As we have grown, the question often asked is: “When will Zimbra extend its platform support to a given operating system?” Given the success of Zimbra Desktop on Linux, Mac, and Windows – we felt that a server version for Windows as was the next logical choice.

Obviously there are several hurdles going from a Linux environment to Windows, all of the third party applications we rely on need to have freely available cross-platform versions. We’ve partnered with OpenLDAP team, who have stepped up to provide an compatibility patch for a Microsoft Active Directory emulation mode. Combined with a new mail transfer agent written from the ground up, we’re pleased to bring you: Zimbra Collaboration Suite for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

This isn’t the first time we’ve switched a package in favor of our own custom code – in Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 we threw out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch. Replacing Postfix has been the major hurdle for a while now; the engineering team knew that it would be a daunting task.

I already do a lot of my dev work in Eclipse & IntelliJ on Windows. Previously we put PowerShell wrappers around our command line tools to assist more advanced admins. Now we’ve utilized MSI technology to provide the easiest install of a mail server ever. — Anand Palaniswamy, Server Team Lead

This extends Zimbra’s reach of services to the most widely deployed operating systems in the world – theoretically any Windows product; though XP, Vista and 7 will not be officially supported on the Network Edition since they don’t have the same long-term backing by Microsoft development teams. Editions tested by our quality assurance group cover the major versions of Windows Server 2008 including Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, HPC (high-performance computing cluster), Web Server, Small Business, Essential Business, and Foundation Server adaptations; in both x86 & x86_64-bit variants. We hope that the community will step up to cover Itanium based processors.

For the future, the server team is working to integrate Zimbra’s Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with Windows Storage Server, for moving messages and attachments from a primary to a secondary volume based on the age of the message; which lets you to store less frequently accessed data on cheaper disks. Of note, the updates to junctions, reparse points, and symbolic links in recent NTFS versions allows us to do single-instance-storage as well.

We’re playing with .NET access for our SOAP interfaces in the labs. It’s potential is very impressive. — Kevin Henrikson, UI Team Lead

The compatibility with Windows will enable a large, new market for our HSP & VAR partners. To quote Jim Morrisroe, VP of the Zimbra Business Unit here at Yahoo: “It is key to delivering on our strategy and commitment to provide the best experience for users and administrators of any messaging platform in the market today. This launch enables us to sell to 2 million new small businesses and enterprises that view Microsoft server technology as integral to their success.”

ZCS version 5.0.15 for Windows platforms is now available on both the Open Source and Network Edition download pages. The Network Edition will be classified as beta until ZCS 6.0 is released – and will then contain the same product support as well as subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. If you have any questions please contact our Windows sales team.

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See the ZimbraWindows directory alternative to ZimbraServer in each branch of our public perforce cache for relevant files and build definitions. Try it out – you can leave us feedback thoughts below or over in the Community Forums.

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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

This version of Zimbra Desktop brings us close to a full suite of online & offline features, definitely try it out. Incase you’ve missed all the new stuff packed into previous editions, stop by the respective blog entries on Beta 4 & Beta 3.

We are very excited to announce the arrival of sharing in Zimbra Desktop for ZCS accounts!

• This is currently done by proxying, so no data of guest mailboxes are downloaded/cached offline to the local computer.



• Existing users may need to ‘trigger sync’. Simply edit the mountpoint online using the web-client (such as renaming it) to force availability in Zimbra Desktop. This is because mailbox sync is token based, and for data types newly introduced in desktop we don’t go back in time to acquire them. (Additionally, creating shares from the desktop client will be addressed with the ZCS 5.0.12 release.)
• Pushing change notifications to the UI when working with shared content is no small task, even for the ZCS server/client. The team managed to address delegate store/shared folder updates and even implemented cross-server notification support, eliminating the need for manual refreshes.

Of course the enhancements don’t stop there:

• Everyone raved about this in our Yahoo! Calendar Beta front-end, so it was time to bring the feature into play for Zimbra Desktop – introducing “Fisheye” view:




• Yahoo! & Google Calendar Sync – it’s all about CalDAV. (Give the new Yahoo! Calendar powered by Zimbra a spin.)

 

• Beta 4 added address book integration for Ymail accounts, and Beta 5 extends that to Gmail users. Enable in account setup; actual contacts vs auto added ‘emailed contacts’ distinction is underway.



• Built-in Inquisitor support for the web search bar – bringing you fast lookups, auto-complete, and search history. (If you are not familiar with Inquisitor, or want to add it to another browser, you can read about it here.) To change preference settings use shift+F6 to reveal the status bar, click on the gear in the lower right, then choose Tools > Add-ons, and go to the Extensions tab; you can even toggle the search engine used.
• Revamped import/export UI available in preferences for easier access – which helps you add iCalendars and contacts from comma-separated-value format. It even provides a quick backup using the previously covered tar formatter; that’s also useful for ZCS-to-ZCS migrations, as it contains both account info and items plus associated metadata.
  
  
• Streamlined layout for the account configuration menu.
• SSL enforcement – we now detect invalid/untrusted/mismatched certificates and prompt the user if they still wish to proceed.

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

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

Admins in the U.S got a chance to talk shop at EDUCAUSE and the LISA ‘08 summit, but what about those in Europe? Don’t despair, because we’re co-hosting a mini-conference with MySQL, SchoolForge, RedHat, Sun, Op5, and Fusis at our UK headquarters in London on November 27th.

While the presentations are specifically aimed at education as well as the non-profit sector, anyone is welcome to attend. Engage us in discussions about your thoughts on the latest technology, how it blends with your school’s ICT strategy, or tackle open source trends for the future. Details on the schedule are over at OpenSourceInSchools.org.uk (of course registration is free, and besides providing the specifics it also gets you a complimentary lunch).

Just a bit on new stuff that’s graced the Zimlet scene lately:

Xythos
Drag and drop your emails (including entire conversations with meta-data or just the attachments) from Zimbra into an Xythos folder of your choosing. Create new emails and link to documents stored on an Xythos content management server for internal accounts – you can even configure expiring tickets to share material with external users.

See it in action here, then contact info@xythos.com if you’d like to try it out.

Dimdim
Join a Dimdim web conference without leaving your inbox; start a meeting right from an email with a single click, drag contacts from your address book, or even drop any appointments in your calendar onto the Zimlet and instantly schedule a Dimdim session.

Dimdim is an awesome open source meeting platform that lets you share your presentations, documents, whiteboards, or desktop (currently Win & Mac with Linux on the roadmap) – and gets you connected via chat, VoIP, or webcam. Run your own server, use their hosted options, or create a free account that lets you connect with up to twenty people at once – attendees don’t even need to be registered.

Grab the Zimet here.

Alfresco
The first content management Zimlet by Starxpert let you save emails, conversations with attachments, or folders onto an Alfresco space.

A newly developed Zimlet from the folks at Alfresco not only helps you save content to ECM server, but also provides the ability to select multiple documents and attach them as links to outgoing emails; several widgets give you ease-of-use in Alfresco space selection and repository navigation. Visit the gallery page to download it.

Get your intent across.
With the new Babelfish Translator & Dictionary Zimlets:



Check them out in the source, they’re coming to your server’s “zimlets-extra” folder shortly – you can even use them in Zimbra Desktop.



 
Auto-Complete & Refined Search

Available in the main branch of perforce are com_zimbra_searchauto & searchrefine. While an updated Yahoo! search Zimlet displays results in a ZmApp tab instead of requiring you to open another browser window.