On Friday, February 22nd VMware hosted the 3rd Annual VMware Zimbra Service Provider Summit in San Francisco, CA. This event brought together our largest Zimbra Service Provider customers from around the world, with the goals of sharing our future vision of the Zimbra platform, fostering discussions on the opportunities and challenges facing carriers today and sharing with one another the best practices and learnings from real world deployments. This year's summit was our largest one ever and included 61 attendees from 14 different carriers and partners from around the Globe.  Our partners heard from the Zimbra leadership on their plans around evolving Zimbra to support their "always on" environments in a non-disruptive manner, as well as providing an optimized messaging experience for mobile devices, tablets, PCs and the Web. Zimbra's culture is rooted in openness and transparency - from our Open Source Edition of Zimbra, to our public forums with over 50,000 Members and finally to our strong Developer Community that has contributed hundreds of extensions to our Zimlet gallery. We believe this transparency and openness benefits each of our carrier partners and their email and collaboration offerings. Their real-world learnings greatly contribute to the quality of our product and our continued partnership will continue to make the Zimbra product better.  Whether you are a mobile carrier in Japan or the biggest cable operator in the US, operating a messaging platform used by millions of subscribers in a 24x7 environment while continuing to innovate and delight subscribers with the best in class messaging experience is critical to success.… Read more »

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:… Read more »

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.… Read more »