Deutsche Schule Tokyo Yokohama (DSTY) is the oldest German school in East Asia, founded in 1904. The school offers education from Kindergarten to High School for German-speaking students in the Tokyo area. Communication between the school's 63 faculty and staff members, as well as with students – enabled by Zimbra – proves to be a key capability for the school's normal daily operation, as well as during one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit Japan. The Challenge Prior to Zimbra, DSTY used another Windows-based e-mail system, which provided messaging ability, and some basic calendar functionality, but it did not have any sharing capability between the two, and did not offer a shared repository for data such as Zimbra Briefcase. “One of the challenges we had was sharing calendars for booking rooms, and finding out when people are available,” recalls John Munro, IT Administrator at DSTY. “We set up a shared calendar resource through Microsoft Outlook with a third-party solution. It was not built into the messaging, and required manual installation on each client and a lot of attention.” “The system was not reliable, and was not always available” he adds.… Read more »

Utah's first ISP, XMission has grown into a leading provider of hosted services to customers in Utah and around the globe. Today, XMission offers Unified Email & Collaboration, a secure, hosted communication service built on VMWare Zimbra Collaboration Suite, that provides email, remote storage, calendaring, collaboration, and task management, all in one economical solution. The Challenge As a hosting provider, XMission started out offering email-only solutions to customers. The company soon realized this was not sufficient. XMission's email customers were managing third-party applications for contacts, and maintaining separate calendaring applications, and they had to support each of these applications themselves. XMission saw those customers really needed a whole communications suite, rather than having to maintain multiple, siloed tools. “We try to be proactive on the services that we offer, and we realized email alone is simply not enough,” explains John Webster, XMission VP of Business Development and Zimbra Product Manager.… Read more »

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 »

Founded in 1997 AINEO Networks was built to provide turnkey IT solutions to meet the needs of companies of all sizes around the world. Today AINEO’s products include three distinct offerings, hosted email, IT support and hosted phone systems. The cornerstone of their business is hosted email, which they first offered in 2008 with a hosted Exchange solution that raised awareness of the benefits of cloud email. The interest in cloud email was high, but with Exchange they quickly ran into stability, scalability and cost issues that threatened their growing business. Because they provided hosted Exchange to their customers and used it internally, AINEO’s team quickly became familiar with the limitations of Exchange from a technical and usability standpoint and it was clear this approach was holding them back. As a partner selling and servicing both Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange, AINEO was at a difficult crossroads between which platform would support their aggressive growth plans for hosted email. They had to decide whether or not to push through the expensive pains of Microsoft Exchange, or decide to go with another solution such as Zimbra. Through thorough analysis they finally reached an internal agreement that it was time to put Microsoft Exchange behind them - both internally and for their customers - and find a solution that was built for the post-PC era.… Read more »

Founded in 1874, Garden Grove is one of the oldest cities in Orange County. As a full service City, Garden Grove offers its 173,000 diverse community members housing assistance, recreational programs, family entertainment, one of the top school districts in the country, and some of the most affordable places to live in “The OC.” Garden Grove employs nearly 1,000 full and part-time employees who work throughout the city and who are supported by a small IT department of 15. In 2009, the City’s email system became obsolete. Scalix’s desktop app didn’t support the remote access and multiple devices employees wanted to use to more effectively get their jobs done. Recognizing the drop in employee productivity as a result of missed meetings and unanswered emails, the IT staff at Garden Grove knew it was time to switch to an email and collaboration system built for the post-PC era. The Challenge: Supporting a New Type of Workforce Garden Grove’s IT Department had three primary requirements when it came to selecting a new email system:… Read more »

Guest post by Bob Menzies of AnyMeeting Recently, I sat down with Chris Murtagh, system engineer and CTO for RE Technology, a company that publishes reviews of software and services for the real estate industry.  I wanted to get a sense of why he chose Zimbra for the organization and how the company has benefited.  We also discussed AnyMeeting and the other Zimlets within Zimbra that he and the company primarily use to help grow the business.  Chris was very gracious and provided some interesting insight on Zimbra and how it can benefit any company.   How long have you used the Zimbra Collaboration Suite? I’ve used Zimbra since 2008, that’s when I first started playing with it.  I’ve worked for three separate companies and have always ended up being the guy who puts all of our systems together.… Read more »