2010 has been a busy year for the Zimbra team since we joined VMware in February.  And today, we are excited to announce the launch of the Zimbra Appliance.

The Zimbra Appliance is our first major step post acquisition to integrate Zimbra and VMware products and provide a simplified IT experience for administrators and their users.  We have spent the last 5 months speaking with VMware and Zimbra customers and re-affirming their need for a simplified collaboration software stack that embraces the IT Platform of the future.

The call for simplicity reflects changes in the overall IT landscape driven by the evolution of user, administrator and datacenter requirements – many of these inspired by events in the consumer market.   Whether it is the simplicity of the Amazon Kindle, the open platform of Facebook or the cross platform support of Twitter, users and administrators expect applications to be easier to use and deliver than ever before.

Here is a summary of market drivers influencing the launch of Zimbra Appliance:

User:

Users want applications to be available on any device, anywhere and anytime.  These applications need to be available using traditional desktop clients and via the browser.  The collaboration cloud is a hub for communications: regardless of device, the user has the context he needs to make decisions — like what flights to take, which purchase orders to accept/reject, or what information should be synced with the CRM system. Additionally, users want to be able to share information with co-workers, partners and other external users.  Ted Schadler at Forrester recently wrote about this need to empower users.

Based on these needs and core to the Zimbra Appliance is our support for Zimbra Desktop, an offline cache of the user’s collaboration cloud, and our browser-based support for desktop, touchpad and mobile browsers.  Additionally, we continue our support for legacy email clients (Microsoft Outlook) and a wide range of mobile devices (iPhone, Android and BlackBerry).

Administrator:

Administrators’ requirements have also changed and now require a simpler application stack that is easier to deploy, manage and update.  Administrative innovations from companies like Saleforce.com and Successfactors have made it easier to deploy, manage and update applications that provide web-based administration tools and a complete software stack (application, operating system and update tools).

As part of offering a collaboration cloud as a complete software bundle, administrators are able to deploy the Zimbra Appliance in under 10 minutes.  Beyond a quick set up, the Zimbra Appliance provides administrative tools for self-service, auto update, security policy control and the ability to remotely wipe a mobile device wipe.

Datacenter:

The last key change in the IT market that is driving simplification is that organizations want to deploy applications in a private or public cloud.  In order to maximize flexibility and drive down the total cost of ownership, applications need to be portable and provide support for standards-based virtualization (OVF) and cross platform back up tools.

The Zimbra team has worked closely with hosting providers like Hosting.com and Contegix as well as many small businesses to make sure that the Appliance can be easily moved from private to personal clouds.  Additionally, the Zimbra Appliance supports VMware’s Data Recovery so that administrators can manage multiple applications with a common back up and recovery tool.

This is just the first step on our efforts to integrate with other VMware products and continue our mission is to simplify IT and to provide a collaboration cloud that can run anywhere.  Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.

Check out a video of the Zimbra Appliance for more information:

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