iZimbra

It’s been a highly guarded secret here @ Zimbra Headquarters. We locked Roland in a room with his iPhone and he came out with iZimbra. Roland is a Zimbra co-founder, and the same developer whose team brought us our AJAX calendar, Standard Client, and the ZMail skin.

Few things have generated as much buzz as the iPhone. According to USA Today, up to 700,000 iPhones have been sold. Some of the people who purchased them were Zimbra Customers and Users. They’ve been asking us in our support portal, as well as in our forums, if/how were we going to support the iPhone. . .and so far, our story as been iSync or using our standard client on Safari – which works quite well.

However, today we’re announcing that we’ve developed a mobile web client for the iPhone that is 100% standards compliant, and will be included with ZCS 5.0. We will be bundling it into our Network and Open Source editions as a standard feature, much like the Standard HTML client. It’s built upon a JSP tag library that we’ve developed which allows Customers to easily change the Zimbra UI to fit their needs.

The fact that it only took a couple of days for us to implement an iPhone skin not only speaks volumes about Roland’s team,
but also about our platform and the flexibility with which one can create new clients.

iZimbra will allow all of our users to get their address books, e-mail, and calendars wherever they are, without the need for the iSync or Outlook connectors. The client works over the air, either by WiFi or EDGE. Just point the iPhone to your Zimbra Server via Safari,
and go.

Our client uses many of the iPhone’s built in features, and acts just like any other application. For example, when browsing the address book, you can look at a contact’s information. If you press on their address, the Google Maps application will display the address. If you click on the Phone number, the iPhone will dial the contact’s number.

We’ve uploaded a video, as well as some pics of it on an iPhone. It’s pretty difficult to get good quality video on the iPhone, so we used iPhoney to show off the client (on a live URL), and the final version will have the sidescrolling effect.

The first version of the iPhone skin will ship with Beta 3 of our 5.0 codebase, which we expect in August.

We welcome your suggestions and comments. Join the discussion in our Forums.

Click to launch iZimbra Player Broadband Version 1024×760 Recommended 20MB Video Requires QuickTime		Click to launch iZimbra Player Lower Speed Version 5 MB Video Requires QuickTime/m4v player
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