It’s my pleasure to announce that today Zimbra 8 is now available to the public! With the release of Zimbra 8, VMware takes another step forward in providing users and IT organizations with a new way to collaborate in a post-PC world. Based on feedback from our customers, the goals of Zimbra 8 were to invest in unified communications, to deliver on the simplicity of the private and public cloud and to continue to make the user experience easier to access while on the go.  Zimbra 8 was a community effort and the VMware team thanks all of our customers and partners for their input and help over the last 2 years of planning and execution. New to Zimbra 8.0, VMware has partnered with Cisco and Mitel to offer unified communications capabilities embedded within Zimbra. These deep integration capabilities allow users to connect their voice and message systems in a unified inbox, enabling Click2Call, voicemail, presence, and chat all from within the Zimbra Web app. Zimbra 8.… Read more »

A big advantage of Zimbra is its extensibility and interoperability. By providing an email solution that is both robust and extensible, Zimbra is open to the community to build enhancements to its core functionality and bring new, custom features to Zimbra users. One of the best examples of a value added solution comes from mxHero Inc, which has tightly integrated their open-source email enhancement platform with Zimbra, bringing innovative functionality through a continuously growing catalogue of plugins. Among the 23 plugins currently available: Hero Attach: Send emails of any size to anyone. For example, send a 200Mb photo album. Auto Signature:… Read more »

Today’s messaging and collaboration systems must be highly reliable: end users need access to email and calendaring 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Designing a reliable messaging and collaboration environment entails choosing the proper storage, server and operating system. Many of us employ storage area networks (SANs) to provide that storage reliability, but SANs require specialized expertise to manage. Today, VMware Zimbra is releasing a new whitepaper detailing our testing of Zimbra with support for NetApp Network File-based Storage (NFS) and VMware vSphere, a significant competitive advantage over other email and collaboration systems. Zimbra 7 takes a new, innovative approach towards messaging and collaboration. File-based storage gives customers additional flexibility, scalability and cost savings when designing and deploying a messaging system. Listed below are just some of the benefits of using file-based storage for your enterprise email deployments:… Read more »

Zimlets and the ability to extend the Zimbra Web Client is a pretty widely known capability. But did you know that Zimbra also has a framework that allows developers to extend Zimbra server-side functionality? Zimbra Server Extensions provide a mechanism to add functionality to the server in lieu of modifying web.xml and other web server configuration files. By implementing a Server Extension, you can inject or in some cases, intercept, server-side functionality. Some examples include: Handling authentication requests against a user store different than the built-in Zimbra LDAP user store. Server Extensions provide a way to "plug-in" your custom authentication mechanism.… Read more »

For years, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) has exposed mailbox data via REST. And lately, a few customers have asked about the Zimbra REST API (e.g. How is the API used? What methods are available? How does the Zimbra REST API compare to the Zimbra SOAP API?). So I thought it would be good to revisit the topic.… Read more »

It may sound odd offering more Zimbra installation advice since there is a lot on the subject in other blogs, our documents, wiki and Forums. In fact, some quick research surfaced over 1.4 million hits for Zimbra server install on the web and 36,000 on the Zimbra site alone. But we are also fortunate to have more new Zimbra users than ever, and after helping some trial customers recently, it was a good reminder a few simple tips can help cut through some noise and avoid time-consuming snags once you start the install process. So without further ado here are the top 6 common pre-requisites to consider when preparing for your Zimbra installation: 1. Firewall Servers have firewalls configured once the operating systems are installed for security purposes. Our recommendation is to temporarily disable the firewall on the system during a single and multi-server Zimbra installation.… Read more »