Zimbra Desktop 2.0 Beta 4 has just been released. Zimbra Desktop is a free and open source email client application that gives you on- and off-line access to all your email accounts in one place. Whether you use Zimbra, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra Desktop greatly simplifies your inbox experience.
A detailed list of ZD 2.0 enhancements is available at the Zimbra Product Portal. If you are coming from an earlier ZD 2.0 Beta, one of the bigger differences you’ll notice is Zimlet support. We’ve included Zimlets like Email Reminder and everyone’s favorite Social. And you can install additional ZD compatible Zimlets via the Preferences area.
Download links are provided below. Please comment, submit feedback and questions via the Community Forums, or make use of Bugzilla to file confirmed bugs and request enhancements.
Have you ever found yourself scrambling to find a WebEx meeting invite minutes before the meeting is set to begin? Or if you are scheduling a meeting, you are constantly switching between WebEx and your calendar to create the meeting & calendar invite?
Well, those days are gone with the new WebEx Zimlet. The WebEx Zimlet now brings the power of WebEx right into your Zimbra calendar. To see the WebEx Zimlet in action, checkout this video.
Create WebEx meeting just like you would create a regular meeting.
Typically you would switch between Zimbra and WebEx to create a meeting. With the WebEx Zimlet, when creating your appointment in Zimbra, simply press the “Save as WebEx” button to create a WebEx meeting. The Zimlet automatically selects the configured WebEx account to be use (see below for information on multiple WebEx account setup), creates a WebEx meeting, inserts all the WebEx details (WebEx url, phone, passcode, etc) into the appointment body and saves the meeting.
Create a Quick meeting.
Allows users to quickly invite people and create a WebEx meeting.
Start or Join an existing meeting.
You do not have to scramble to find that WebEx invite or goto the WebEx site to find a meeting. You can view a list of meetings on your Webex Calendar and Start (as a host) or Join (as an attendee).
Manage multiple WebEx accounts.
You can store up to 5 WebEx accounts (with related conference calling information). This is especially useful if you are managing multiple shared calendars. For example, if you create a WebEx meeting in the CEO Calendar, the Zimlet will automatically uses CEO WebEx account information.
Full support for recurring meetings.
The WebEx Zimlet supports all of the WebEx recurring types and end-by patterns. Therefore, you can create virtually any kind of recurring meetings in Zimbra and the WebEx Zimlet creates an exact replica on WebEx.
Automatic time-zone configuration.
The WebEx Zimlet maps the 82 supported Zimbra time zones to the WebEx 61 time zones. This allows users to select a time zone and leave the setup of the WebEx meeting to the Zimlet.
Add meeting and tele-conference information to Subject/Location fields.
Lot of times its useful to just put the WebEx meeting and conference information in the location field itself. The WebEx Zimlet has a preference to select what you want to be appended and Zimlet automatically inserts the information.
As you can see, the WebEx Zimlet provides an awesome integration between Zimbra and WebEx. And will greatly simply your day-to-day online meetings.
Note: due to a technical difficulties, we apologize for the many updates and Tweets to this blog post.
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).
With over 55 million commercial Zimbra mailboxes deployed worldwide, and millions more on open source, there are many users reaping the benefits of our next-generation collaboration experience. Many factors contributed to our rapid adoption — such as integrated conversation views, tagging, sharing, powerful search, and mobility — but one of the most important is the ability to customize and extend Zimbra.
To promote extensibility, the Zimbra platform exposes powerful Theme, Data and Zimlet APIs. With these APIs, you can customize everything from branding and interface styles…to integrating external applications & services…to implementing new features. And with a vibrant Community continually using these technologies to enhance Zimbra, the customization you are looking for might already be available.
To that end, we have been busy at work leveraging new resources from our friends at VMware and are pleased to announce the new Zimbra Gallery as the destination for sharing Zimbra product extensions.
The new Gallery includes improved navigation and search capabilities so it is easier than ever to find extensions for Zimbra. The Gallery supports ratings and reviews so Community members can share their feedback and experiences. It is also much easier to share extensions, update status and highlight your work with improved extension “landing pages.”
Please visit the Gallery, download extensions, provide feedback and contribute. We look forward to seeing the library of available extensions in the Zimbra Gallery expand in the weeks and months to come. Enjoy!
This is one people have asked about a lot. Starting with Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, we will be providing a formal Zimlet Developer’s Guide and API Reference. The goal of this documentation is to make it easier for partners and customers to build Zimlets and to integrate with the Zimbra platform. As we’ve built this documentation, here are some of our guiding principles:
Easy to find. Make the documentation online and “wiki-based” for easy access.
Reduce “wondering” between versions. Maintain documentation with each ZCS release so when new major versions of ZCS are delivered (and changes are made to the APIs), people on older ZCS releases can still access their “version specific” documentation.
Lower overhead to get started. Make developing Zimlets possible without having to download the entire product source. Of course, product source will still be available for those who want it but we want to make even advanced Zimlet tasks (for example, compiling templates) possible without needed the entire source tree.
Here are links to the new developer documentation:
These are living documents and we will be adding content & more information over the coming weeks. With this first-launch, we are looking for your thoughts on the best ways you enjoy learning and making use of the new material, as well as ideas and suggestions about Zimlet topics that you think we should cover. Please provide feedback and comments in the forums at:
Pay attention to the extra bar at the top to navigate around the wiki pages:
Whether you just want dozens of examples, a list of all the elements in the Zimlet Definition File…or want to dive into advanced topics like Templates and Portals, we plan to leave no stone unturned.
If you have 100s or even 1000s of contacts and perhaps also using multiple address books and want to organize them, this one is for you. With lot of contacts also comes organization or maintenance, syncing and other issues. For example, say you want to move all your company’s contacts into one address book so you can share company’s address book to someone, or, say file all of them by “(Company) First Name Last Name” format so its easy to sort them and differentiate them, you will immediately see there is no easy way to do that.
And that’s where this Zimlet come in. Its a very powerful and flexible Zimlet and provides 5 different ways (& several combination) to help organize your contacts. It also organizes across multiple Address books (simply use ctrl -key or Shift-key to select multiple folders).
1. Move or Cleanup:
- Move all contacts with xyz domain in ALL address book folders into xyz Addressbook.
For example, say you want to move all gmail contacts to folder called ‘gmail friends’. Assuming you already have an addessbook folder by name ‘gmail friends’, here is how you would do that:
STEPS:
Select “Contact’s email contains” menu,
Enter “gmail.com” in the next field
Select all the folders using Shift key or ctrl key from “in folder(s): ” menu
Select ‘Move Contacts to:’ Radio button
Select the folder ‘gmail friends’
Press Organize
Other use cases:
- Move some Contacts in ALL Address Book to Trash
- Move ALL Contacts in Some Address Book to Trash
- Move ALL Contacts in ALL Address Book to Trash
2. Merge:
- Move all contacts in multiple Address-books(say AB2, AB3 & AB4) to a single address book(AB1)
3. “Sort and Store” aka “file-As”:
- Zimbra by default sorts contacts by last name but lot of people want to sort by Company and one of the way you can achieve this is by filing them as “(Company) Firstname Lastname” or “Company Lastname, FirstName” or “Company”
- You can use File-as Action to simply file all your contacts in a specific format for consistent appearance.
4. Tag:
- Tag all contacts that contains some domain(say zimbra.com) with some tag(say: zimbra folks)
5. Contacts with Phone number(for mobile sync): This is one of the special actions I added to help mobile users to move all the contacts that has phone number to one folder. Which in-turn makes it easier to make phone calls.
e.g. move all contacts with phone numbers to “has phone number” Address book. Now, sync it to mobile phone and you can be sure to know that the contacts in that folder has some phone number.
PS:
1. For more details and to download: Visit Gallery
2. Please make sure to to take backup of all your Address books before using this (from Preferences > Address Book > Export)
Every now and then we get messages from co-workers and others that we are not interested in. It gets annoying especially when it becomes a huge back-and-forth thread of conversation. And we fall into this gray-area where we don’t necessarily want to manually filter them or, we don’t want to see such conversations either. So we end-up constantly deleting them as and when they arrive.
For example: I am a front-end engineer and I belong to a broad-distribution list called ‘engineering’. And although I usually read messages from this distribution list, at times I see message-threads regarding server-side engineering or something else that I don’t necessarily care about.
So ideally, we should be able to click-a-button to unsubscribe or ignore a ’specific’ conversation but continue to get other messages as usual.
Now with this Zimlet you get a ‘ignore’ toolbar button. When you click on the ‘ignore’ button, this Zimlet takes the subject of the message and creates a filter ‘on-the-fly’ and also move that message to “Ignored Messages” folder. Because of this filter, we will prevent any future messages of that thread from showing up in your Inbox or your folder.
And secondly, as you know, since such message threads lasts only for a week or two so, we expire these filters every 10-days(by default). This expiration date also helps in keeping the filter from bloating.
PS:
- You need to manually Turn-ON the Zimlet by clicking on it in the left-panel.
- We only create a single filter called “Move these messages to Ignored messages Folder” and we add/remove ’subject’ conditions within this filter.
With the first ZCS 6.0 Beta recently released, and our product tracking portal turning greener and greener, the “I’m so excited and can’t wait!” comments in the forums become reminiscent of kids opening presents. There are always a slew of great features and improvements in the oven, so we’ve prepared a little sneak peak into what we’re cooking up for the advanced AJAX web-client in Zimbra 6.0.
Lots of us have composed a new mail or appointment, only to need something else in another message; so the launch in a separate window icon has become prominent in everyday use. Others like the same browser instance, and choose not to select the ‘always compose in a new window’ option – as it can sometimes take a few seconds to load, and previously didn’t contain all the same functionality. Without using the detached window feature, when creating several messages there was no easy way to switch besides saving and opening from drafts. How to handle the need to open multiple items within the same client? Tabs of course.
(The tabs are revealed on new compose, or upon opening deep message-view.)
Meanwhile the prevalence of cheaper LCD technology has many adopting multi-monitor setups, and netbooks typically trade height for wider screens that fit keyboard layouts; the flip in horizontal & vertical horizons means the traditional reading pane on the bottom might not take advantage of all the screen’s real estate. Enter the right hand reading pane or ‘third panel’ view:
Some like reading the newest message in an expanded conversation first to bring them up to speed, while others prefer a logical ordered sort – you can now pick either.
(We’ve also implemented a column view variation in the standard HTML client.)
Grab ZCS 6.0 Beta 1 from the downloads page; or nightly source from the perforce cache (the new buildZCS script makes it easier than ever). Then give us your feedback, or stay current with all the improvements over in Bugzilla, PMweb, and the Community Forums.
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:
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.
