Zimbra

For years, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) has exposed mailbox data via REST. And lately, a few customers have asked about the Zimbra REST API (e.g. How is the API used? What methods are available? How does the Zimbra REST API compare to the Zimbra SOAP API?). So I thought it would be good to revisit the topic.

Some background: REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an approach for building application services that make application resources available via a URL. There is more than ample information about REST out there on the web so I’ll just point you to the REST Wikipedia article for simplicity.

The Zimbra REST API is a great mechanism for reading user mailbox data and outputting that data in different formats (everything from XML-and-JSON to RSS-and-Atom to iCal-and-VCF). In addition to reading data, we’ve exposed methods to import items — like contacts and appointments — into a mailbox. This capability is very useful when performing a migration (i.e. “how do I import contacts from one system into Zimbra?”)

Here is an example of using the REST API to read mailbox data: if you want an output of messages from the “john doe” inbox folder, you call the Zimbra REST API like this:

http://localhost:7070/home/john.doe/inbox?fmt=xml

You can try this method against a Zimbra server via a browser but more commonly customers use the REST API methods from perl scripts or PHP applications…or even just from the command line using curl.

Here is an example of importing contacts into the “john doe” account: perform a POST of a CSV file to the “contacts” folder. The following command shows importing contacts using curl:

curl -{username}:{password} --upload-file /tmp/mycontacts.csv http://localhost:7070/home/john.doe/contacts?fmt=csv

That’s just a couple examples and as you can see, the REST API is a simple yet powerful mechanism for accessing mailbox data. For more information on the Zimbra REST API (i.e. information on authentication, output formats or just a list & syntax for the REST API methods), here is a link to Zimbra REST API Reference document:

http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=ZCS_6.0:Zimbra_REST_API_Reference

One more thing: A very common question is: “why does the SOAP API support so many more functions than the REST API?” Well, the Zimbra REST API is different (in form and function) than the Zimbra SOAP API. At a high level, it’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison. The REST API is for accessing user mailbox data, and the SOAP API is for executing functionality on the server (which can access user mailbox data and also perform account and administrative functions).

The Zimbra SOAP API is the foundational platform service that the Zimbra Web Client uses to communicate between the browser and the Zimbra server. As you can imagine, to create the rich interface experience the Zimbra Web Client delivers, the SOAP API is very complete with advanced and complex functionality, much more than the REST API. To re-create all of this complex functionality in REST API would be a challenge as well as take significant time. So as the alternative, we expose the SOAP API for direct use by our customers & partners.

But that’s another story…I’ll save the Zimbra SOAP API discussion for a different day…until then, enjoy the REST API and happy coding!

Zimbra’s massive user base means our new product releases reach farther than ever before. How far? Consider our 50 million paid mailbox count. With that comes the responsibility to make our solutions exactly what people need when it comes to shaping the future of communication.

So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?

Sync your phone like never before.

We’ve added user trigger-able device wipe, server policies, and tasks to the existing MobileSync support for email, contacts, and appointments.

Arrange and personalize the interface.

Read and compose multiple messages in tabs without the need for pop-out windows using the advanced AJAX client. Widescreen? Move the reading pane to the side.

Presentation Framework.

Create new presentations (as well as documents and spreadsheets) from the briefcase – no need for external software to run them.

 

 

Calendar views. Direct CalDav connections. Streamlined contacts.

Our feature rich UI has new layouts including fisyeye and a sortable list view. Access an external ICS/CalDAV url – with adjustable automatic update polling frequencies. For the address book: Rather than pages of blanks to fill out, add only the contact fields you want.

Lite-client overhauls galore.

The standard HTML client now includes all our primary apps, plus the ability to drag items like it’s AJAX cousin. Using a web-browser on your mobile device? There’s multiple variants based on device type and connection speed. We’ve added appointment management functionality to the portable web-client, a simplified login page, as well as file access.

Role based administration.

Delegate. Empower distribution list managers without worrying about them accidentially changing major server settings. Even let someone add or remove members, but not create or delete existing lists – the views and ACL rights are that customizable. Hosting providers can now give one account permission to manage multiple domains or adjust class-of-service features.

 

 

Connect with your social world.

Zimlets now have the ability to define application or preferences tabs. So use the new Social Zimlet to manage Twitter, Facebook, or just browse Digg. Try the Discover Zimlet to visit all that Del.icio.us has to offer.

Share Management.

Join a new group? Get up to speed fast – receive and an instant email about all the available shares. Didn’t accept that invite long ago but turns out you need something? Rather than digging it up, just use the new share tool to see what you have permissions on; or have given to others.

Server Architecture Improvements.

A few of the powerful under-the-hood changes include a new OpenLDAP engine with the ability to make on the fly config tweaks, SQLite & RRD for logger, customizable hierarchical storage queries. Plus we’ve exposed a UI for the stats service – giving you quick insight on just about everything you can think of.

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.

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!

The Zimbra Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (ZCB) beta period is now closed; starting today ZCB is generally available (GA)!

Zimbra Network Edition (and trial) customers who have Zimbra Mobile may use ZCB free of charge, and it is fully supported by the Zimbra team.

This version of ZCB focuses on features and functionality requested by our largest BlackBerry constituency – small to medium businesses looking to migrate from their existing collaboration platforms, hence the official name: Zimbra Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server Small Business Edition. You may use it with up to 50 devices running on BlackBerry Professional or BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for Exchange.

The addition of ZCB to Zimbra Collaboration Suite is significant because it is the only next-generation, open source email and collaboration platform to offer native integration with BES (and joins existing providers Microsoft, IBM and Novell). Until now, alternative platforms required 3rd party outsourced providers to channel BES, which meant less control and potentially higher costs for organizations.

With ZCB GA plus ZCS 6.0 (coming soon) providing mobile enhancements like Task sync, remote device wipe and many new features for mass-market devices ActiveSync devices, including the iPhone; the Zimbra Mobile family has more well-rounded mobility for a broader range of users and devices than ever before. Providing features key to collaboration: Such as full access to your global directory list, robust searching, support for multi-node ZCS configurations in addition to the native over-the-air synchronization of mail, calendars, and contacts. Moving forward, we will also look to further expand our ZCB offering to support Nginx proxy and larger organizations – one of the fastest growing markets for Zimbra.

We are very proud to have achieved this milestone and want to thank everyone for their testing and support throughout the process!

Network Edition users may register and download the ZCB GA here.

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.)

[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.

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.

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.

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!

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.