Tomorrow the VMware and Zimbra team will be hosting a live webinar covering some key differences between Zimbra and Google Apps.   It will be quite informative and an opportunity to ask questions of the Zimbra team; here is the webinar information from the Zimbra Webinar Series:

If you cannot attend in person tomorrow, a recording will be available about a week after.   Please be sure to visit our webinar page where you can find it as well as other upcoming webinars; here is a tentative upcoming webinar list:

Jan 19th
Zimbra vs. Google Apps

Feb 9th
Zimbra 7.0 Launch – Live Demo

March 2nd
Zimbra vs. GroupWise

March 16th
Zimbra vs. MS Exchange

Zimbra partner Irontec of Spain recently posted a new Zimlet integration for SugarCRM in the Zimbra Gallery called “zSugar“.  This is allows end users to attach email correspondences to an Account, Contact, Opportunity or Project.

Feel free to try it out and provide your feedback, the Irontec team has deployed this with several customers already and plans on releasing an RC candidate shortly.  (Note the screen capture on the right is Spanish, but the UI is localized in English and Catalan as well).

For those less familiar with the category of CRM <—> email integrations, zSugar is similar to the Salesforce Zimlet currently available for Salesforce.com in the Zimbra Gallery which allows end users to manage their leads and customers more efficiently by not making them log in to the CRM each time records need to be updated.  (Missing correspondences in CRM records are the bane of many in sales and support, so reducing friction is critical).

SFDC Zimlet picture below:

How often do you spend extra time searching for the document that you want to attach to an email, or even worse you forget to attach the document before you hit send? The Drag and Drop Zimlet saves you time and makes it really easy. All you do is drag the files that you want to upload directly from the desktop to the Mail composer and drop them into your email. It’s that simple!

Back in 2007 Zimbra released the first version of a Firefox 2.0 extension and an accompanying Zimlet to make the mundane task of uploading effortless. We just couldn’t stop there, and contemplated multiple ways to bring this great feature to many clients. Browser Plus was considered, but deep down many of us were really more excited about HTML5’s upcoming possibilities – especially its advantage of not requiring the user to install more add-ons. Fast forward to 2010 and that specification is now a reality.

How to Enable the Drag and Drop Zimlet: Go to Preferences > Zimlets > check the box for “DnD” > save & reload your web-client.

How to Use Drag and Drop with your Documents: Select one or multiple files on your computer. Then simply bring them into the Mail compose window and release them onto the message below the subject line that reads: “Tip: Drag and drop files from your desktop to add attachments to this message”.

Your browser goes to work uploading:

Attachment is complete and a draft is auto-saved:

Download:
The Zimlet comes bundled in the latest server editions and desktop betas but you can also grab it here: http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/drag-and-drop-attachments

Release Notes:

1. The previously XPI plugin is no longer needed with the use of HTML5 in modern browsers, just the Zimlet itself.
2. Compatible with ZCS/ZCA 6.0 (ZD 2.0) and newer.
3. Supported by the following browsers:

• Firefox 3.6+
• Chrome 4+
• Safari 4+ (Mac)

A quick video of the Zimlet in action:




Coming soon: The ability to insert dragged images directly into body, addition to the lite/standard client, and briefcase support for the new HTML5 compatible Zimlet.

Our friends at Smartsheet have just posted a new Zimlet application tab in the Gallery that looks very promising; we have a few uses in mind already for our team and internal Zimbra deployment.  Here is a summary they kindly provided:

Manage Any Kind of Work with the Smartsheet Zimlet
Add the Smartsheet tab to your Zimbra solution and manage your projects, sales pipelines and crowdsourcing solutions as easily as you manage your Calendar.  Smartsheet puts a familiar spreadsheet-like face on a flexible work automation engine.

Integration Overview
Smartsheet is integrated with the following Zimbra features:

• Calendar - view key project dates in your Zimbra calendar or key Zimbra calendar dates in your Smartsheet project calendar
• Contacts - import Zimbra contacts into Smartsheet for streamlined sharing with colleagues and other collaborators
• Briefcase - attach files from your Zimbra Briefcase to any row in Smartsheet
• Email - receive Smartsheet notifications and reminders via email

The Smartsheet Zimlet is now available in the Zimbra Gallery.  Or watch the brief demo video below for more information.

More About Spreadsheet
Work projects often begin their life as a spreadsheet (e.g. sales pipelines, marketing events, research projects, product plans, candidate tracking,…) that gets emailed around to be updated.

Often, this approach falls short, and companies then invest money and training in converting to a software specific to Project Management, CRM, Marketing Automation, HR, etc.  To the millions of Zimbra users – keep the spreadsheet layout you like and gain the additional automation you need.  Smartsheet gives you a familiar, flexible spreadsheet interface and enables you to:

• Attach any file or Zimbra Briefcase item to any row
• Create multiple levels of sub-tasks
• Track  threaded discussion on any row
• See your sheet in Calendar and Gantt views
• Set Alerts and Notification on any row that keep you abreast of changes happening
• Get discrete updates on pieces of your sheet via email
• Get a consolidated report across many sheets

It’s the perfect union between spreadsheets, project tools and file sharing sites.

Video Tour

In final installment of this series we recently had a chance to sit down with Frances Atkinson, the Director of Institutional & Academic Technologies, IT Services at Simon Fraser University, one of the over 500 educational organizations that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. Not too long ago, SFU decided to upgrade their collaboration system and investigated several options. No surprise, Zimbra won out! Now, two and a half years later, SFU is seeing how Zimbra is benefiting all of their campus systems.

Highlights from our discussion with Frances are below:

How are SFU’s staff, faculty, and students using Zimbra Collaboration Suite?

Zimbra has become more than just an email and calendaring solution at Simon Fraser – it has evolved into the campus communications “hub” used by all faculty, staff and students. With Zimbra, calendaring and document sharing are available to everyone for the first time, and fewer users are forwarding to external sites like Gmail. Additionally, SFU connected Zimbra to other campus systems increasing campus-wide organization and efficiency. Students and faculty also have the ability to access Zimbra via mobile devices, including BlackBerrys. This mobile access is even more important since we now have the ability to send out notifications to all users for emergencies, weather, downtime, etc.

 
How are you customizing Zimbra to meet the needs of the SFU student body?

SFU is taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source functionality by using several Zimlets – including Calendar Scheduler, Arcade, Google Translator and Yahoo Local – we are able to extend the product and bring features to people who may not have otherwise found these resources.

We have even generated Zimlets of our own. These SFU Zimlets offer students and faculty a simple way to access course information, alerts/tips & tricks and their mySFU profiles. The course resource Zimlet is definitely the most important Zimlet for the students. It allows them to pull up all their course information for the current, past and next term, including the course description, syllabus, video content and digitized lectures. It helps to keep students organized and on track to graduate. Faculty and staff also utilize Zimlets to reserve rooms and equipment.

Additionally, we have branded Zimbra as SFU Connect, and we got the community involved by holding a naming and logo contest. We’ve personalized SFU Connect by providing users with a tip/trick or message of the day upon startup to help them use the portal to its full capacity.

 
What are your students and/or faculty saying about Zimbra?

Zimbra satisfied the desire of the students and faculty to have access to a modern, feature-rich, communications environment. Not only is the email and calendaring solution functional and well-suited to serve the entire campus, but its open source nature is lauded by faculty and students alike. By choosing an open source product, SFU has the potential to integrate with other products as the University’s needs continue to evolve.

Every day, when you first login, this Zimlet scans your calendar and sends out a summary email about the current day’s events.

This Zimlet helps both frequent and lite calendaring users in different ways:

1. For power-users, this is like having a personal assistant; who summarizes appointments for the day, providing a concrete idea as to how many meetings you have.
2. For general-users, the Zimlet helps in reminding you that there is a meeting to prepare for (in case you’ve forgotten)

To make it easier to read, the appointments are sorted and divided along two simple categories:  Those that need your immediate attention (e.g confirmed or new events) and others that don’t (those you’ve marked tentative, free, out-of-office, or declined but not yet deleted).

Download:

Available in our Zimbra Gallery over here

Rate & Review:

After you have used the Appointment Summary Zimlet, please come-back to share what you thought of it at our Gallery.

PS: This is one of our favorite recent Zimlets within the Zimbra team, and we hope you enjoy it too!

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.

Or to experience first hand, download the WebEx Zimlet at the Zimbra Gallery at http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/webex.

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).

Q: Can you mention the URL for the new dev Wiki?
A: A good place to start wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/ZCS_6.0:Zimlet_Developers_Guide:Introduction

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.”

Checkout the new Gallery at http://gallery.zimbra.com

The Gallery includes new Zimlets & Themes as well as some updated favorites such as Appointment Summary, Birthday Reminder, Email Attachment Alert, Email Downloader and Email Quotes.

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!