Zimbra

For the last post in the Power Zimlet Series (Attach Email, Ignore Conversations, Contact Organizer, Task Reminders), we are ending on a lighter note.

Zimlet 5: Emoticons in Email

Who doesn’t love emoticons? They are core part of life online and I admit am a huge fan of them.

Historically Zimbra has always supported emoticons – but only in IM.   For ZCS 6.0 (coming very soon) we have made some enhancements to the Zimlet platform (including the ability to create new ‘application tabs’) that enable us to now support emoticons in email compose as well.

When you write an email you can simply enter your standard text emoticon [example: :)  ], or now you can select an emoticon visually using a button in the compose window that will insert the text for you (see below).  When you receive an email, emoticon text is automatically displayed as an image.

Now, emoticons are great but occasionally you might not want to see emoticons in your email, may be because some code or some text that’s unintentionally matching emoticons. So, we have added “Temporarily Disable in Mail” to help disable emoticons. Right click on the Zimlet in the left pane, and select it, then reopen the email. Further, Double click on Zimlet in the over-view panel to permanently enable/disable it.

Enjoy!

PS: This will be shipped as a default Zimlet in ZCS 6.0.

In the last 3 posts in the Power Zimlet series we covered tools for improving email and contacts: contact organizer, ignoring conversations and attaching emails to messages.  Today we are turning to a new application in ZCS that many, including myself, find incredibly useful – Tasks.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite has had the Tasks application for some time now, but as of yet it doesn’t support reminders.  And without reminders it is hard to keep track of Tasks at hand, making it sometimes hard to use.  This new Zimlet fills that gap by providing a reminder digest once a day.

Zimlet 4: Tasks Reminders

How the Zimlet works:
Once a day (when you first login), this Zimlet searches for your Tasks (and shared Tasks) and displays a list of all Tasks that are overdue, in-progress, etc. This list is shown only for Tasks that are due 2-weeks (14 days) from today and continues to show for 2-weeks post due-date. This date range is user configurable.

Additional Features:
- It also has a “Send Email” Feature, which helps in follow up of tasks. For example: You might want to send mail to someone asking why they are lagging behind their tasks, etc.
- You can click on the Zimlet and press “Show Again” to see the Reminder dialogs again anytime.

Below is a picture of the Tasks Reminder dialog that appears (sorted by date urgency).

As usual, you can get this and learn more in the Zimbra Gallery.

Up next: Emoticons in Email

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Power Zimlet #3

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:

1. Select “Contact’s email contains” menu,
2. Enter “gmail.com” in the next field
3. Select all the folders using Shift key or ctrl key  from “in folder(s): ” menu
4. Select ‘Move Contacts to:’ Radio button
5. Select the folder ‘gmail friends’
6. 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)

Power Zimlet #2

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.

For more information and to download:Visit Zimlets Gallery

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As a long-time Zimbra developer and employee, I’ve spent countless hours each week using Zimbra email.  I love the overall experience, especially because I have been able to tailor it to my personal style using Zimlets.  They are easy to create and over time I have built quite a few.  So without further ado, the following is the first of a 5 post series featuring new Zimlets which I think are incredibly useful and empower Zimbra users.

Zimlet 1: Attach Emails

Every so often I miss the ability to easily to attach an earlier email while composing an new email message.  This Zimlet does just that, it adds an “Attach Email” tab in the Attachments dialog in Mail Compose. Once you click on the Email tab you can search for emails that you want to attach or just scroll the list. You can even ‘browse’ for emails by clicking on the folder tree.  Finally, something I really like is with any of these methods you can also select multiple emails and attach them simultaneously.

Here is how it works… assume you are composing or replying to an email and now you want to attach some earlier email…

1. Click on the Add Attachment Button

2. Click on the Attach Mail tab

3. Search or browse for emails (in this case below I’m looking in the Sent folder)

4. Select the email(s) you want to attach – ctrl to select multiple.

5. Click Attach button

You can repeat these steps again if you want for more emails or other attachment types.

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For more screen caps and the download check out the Zimbra Gallery.

Note – you need ZCS 5.0.15 and above or 6.x to use this Zimlet.

Next post… Ignoring Conversations.

Zimbra’s open source roots have always been of great importance to both the company and the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).  When we set out to build a new collaboration system over five years ago, we wanted to bring a fresh perspective to the market, and a big part of that was our commitment to being open source.  We understood sharing ideas within the open source community keeps you a one step ahead of competitors by iterating faster to give users what they want.  A great example demonstrating how the community has flourished is the Zimlet development program.

Zimlets are simple but powerful extensions of ZCS that connect users’ email, calendar, and contacts with any number of outside services (for a couple of recent examples see Alfresco and Peru and TripIt).  Zimlet development growth in the community has been strong and steady, and we are excited to continue supporting the community’s work by providing a place where developers can feature the best of their integrations to share with other Zimbra users.   So, today we are launching an updated Zimlet Gallery where you can pick and choose from many handy new ZCS extensions.

At the same time, we also love seeing our Yahoo! friends continue to embrace openness as part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. In addition to this announcement today, a number of our Yahoo! brethren are extending their platforms to become more open. Today, Yahoo! Mail is introducing applications which enable people to make online payments, access personal photos and more easily send large files directly from their inbox. In addition, My Yahoo! is adding even more third-party applications, driving enhanced personal productivity for users directly from their My Yahoo! start page. You can read more about the Mail and My Yahoo! updates on the Yodel and YDN blogs.

As part of the Zimlet Gallery launch today, we’d like to introduce you to a few new third-party Zimlets, including:

Xythos Zimlet – The Xythos Zimlet allows you to drag and drop email messages and file attachments directly into Xythos’ Enterprise Document Management System.  Secure document management is popular in the enterprise and universities; integration in email is key for ubiquitous adoption.

Processmaker Zimlet – The Processmaker Zimlet helps streamline workflows, like time-off requests, all within Zimbra email (see above).  This Zimlet is already becoming popular and is being deployed at Access America Transport and Ministerio de Vivienda by our Zimbra Partners.

In addition, Zimbra developers have created a handful of new Zimlets, including:

Place Sticky Notes on Email – The new Sticky Notes Zimlet allows you to attach and tag emails with “notes.” One can leave comments, reminders, additional info about the email and more. And Zimbra’s powerful search can search through emails based on the contents of the tags/notes attached to the email.

Email Highlighter – The Colored Emails Zimlet allows you to apply personally assigned colors to emails from specific senders such as a family member, your boss, etc. You can identify senders by color, but you can also create colored emails through tags, making it easier to prioritize any inbox.

Save Email as Documents – With one click, the Email-2-Doc Zimlet lets you save an important email as a Zimbra Document; it will automatically save any attachments as links in the Document as well. The email can then be edited and shared with others.

At Zimbra we’re always trying to provide our community with the most efficient tools for organizing email, address books, calendars and web documents, so it’s only natural that we look to work with other with companies who are as enthusiastic about streamlined processes as we are, and share the same commitment to open standards.

One of the latest things you can now do with Zimbra is integrate with TripIt – an innovative service that organizes and shares your travel itinerary. With TripIt, users simply email their booked travel plans to TripIt, and the service will create a master travel itinerary plan. Users may then access or share this itinerary online, via their mobile device, or from their personal calendar.

This is where we step in. Because Zimbra is an open platform, users of TripIt can instantly access flight times, hotel arrivals, and much more from the convenience of their own Zimbra calendar automatically.  The integration is especially useful in business settings, as Zimbra’s shareable schedule options and synched group calendars allow employees to view their own work-related travel itinerary alongside their co-workers’ in a shared Zimbra calendar. This way, all are kept in the loop regarding everyone’s travel whereabouts at work.

This integration also takes advantage of a number of open standards that are supported by Zimbra and TripIt including email and iCal.  Here’s how you can get TripIt integration within your Zimbra account:

1.   Go to TripIt.com and create an account
2.   When you receive an email from your travel company, forward it to plans@tripit.com
3.   Go to TripIt and find the iCal feed URL and find the URL to subscribe to your calendar
4.   Go back to Zimbra and create a new calendar called “My Trips” or whatever you prefer to call it
5.   Paste in the iCal URL after you select sync with external cal
6.   Right click refresh and your trip calendar should appear!

One of the great things about being an open source company is that we have a passionate community that goes beyond the boundaries of any one location (Zimbra HQ, for example), with community members that participate and contribute from all over the globe.  We saw this early on with the help the community gave us for international translations,  and several of our early partners hailed from as far as South Africa, Brazil and Germany.

So in December when the Ministerio de Vivienda - the  Ministry of Housing in Lima, Peru - began looking for new options to replace their expensive proprietary software with lower-cost, open source alternatives, it came as no surprise that the open source community eventually led them to Software Libre Andino, a Zimbra / Red Hat distributor in Peru who helped replace their outdated systems with modern ones, including Zimbra for collaboration and Alfresco for document management.

The Ministerio de Vivienda, which is responsible for all the housing, construction and sewer systems in Peru, has a mission to improve access to adequate housing and basic services to all the citizens of Peru. Saving the government money is definitely one reason for the switch to Zimbra, but another important factor in their decision to deploy open source solutions is they found that open platforms allow their users to easily integrate and build new solutions on top of this foundation.

In this case they were able to deploy the Alfresco Zimlet created by Zimbra community members and allow a simple way for employees to store documents that are attached in email on the Alfresco server, and in turn select documents from the Alfresco server and attach them to a Zimbra email. Simple, inuitive integrations like these make it easy for government agencies or companies to invest in multiple open source products to meet their needs, instead of choosing proprietary options.

We love to hear stories of how Zimbra and open source technologies travel the globe – if you have any stories you want to share, drop us a line.

(Below: Save attachment to Alfresco and add an attachment to Zimbra from Alfresco).

Zimbra Gallery Pages:
Save in Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet
Alfresco Zimlet Peru

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.