One interesting little feature that we have in the 3.2 release is the Zimbra Assistant. This comes up by hitting the “~” tilde key in message or conversation view. This allows you to quickly add a calendar appointment, a contact to your addressbook, send a quick message or interact with a zimlet. The Assistant autocompletes your command. So as you type “ap”, it autocompletes to “appointment” and gives you the agenda for the day so you know how your day looks like before you schedule the appointment (see screenshot below).
Zimlets can register themselves with the Assistant. Zimlets have an init method that gets called. In that method, they pass in their assitant object, which contains their command name, like “sms”, and a short description for help. The assistant then calls back into that object when that command is invoked. By default, the following Zimlets register with the Assistant – sms, play (the pacman zimlet), map and salesforce. You can SMS out with the Assistant using the SMS zimlet or quickly map a place by saying map 1500 Market St, San Francisco ca. The Salesforce Zimlet and its interactions are particularly interesting – it allows you to autocomplete email/contacts from your salesforce.com database directly. So you can quickly add a note to a salesforce contact using the Assistant with “salesforce c:contactName(which is autocompleted from salesforce) n:had a call – Customer is ok with the quote for this quarter”. This was hacked up by Roland in his copius free time and he calls it CLI for web2.0 :-). Check the flash demo of using the Zimbra Assistant.
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