First of all, a little history …
When Zimbra Collaboration Server 7.2.7 was released back in early 2012, VMware announced that Zimbra Desktop would EOL in a future release of Zimbra.
In July of 2013, Telligent acquired Zimbra from VMware. One of the first things we did was start talking to our customers and we quickly found out about this great email client: Zimbra Desktop. In January of this year, I announced at the Paris Zimbra community meeting that we were re-investing in Zimbra Desktop and that it would continue to be a product offered by Zimbra.
OK, so what is Zimbra Desktop?
Zimbra Desktop is a productivity application that you can install on Windows, Mac or Linux. For people familiar with tools such as Microsoft Outlook, you’ll feel immediately comfortable with Zimbra Desktop:
Zimbra Desktop works both online and offline and does not require Zimbra Collaboration on the back-end – which means you can connect to Microsoft Exchange, Google Gmail and other mail systems through Zimbra Desktop.
Zimbra Desktop also supports the Zimbra ‘Zimlet’ extensibility modules. Zimlets let you extend Zimbra Desktop’s user experience in new and interesting ways.
What are we announcing?
Today, we announced the availability of Zimbra Desktop 7.2.5:
Zimbra Desktop 7.2.5 is a small release, but we have big plans! Right now we’re just getting the engineering trains running again (so to speak). We’ve put together some release notes so you can see what enhancements and bug fixes we made (besides putting the awesome new Zimbra logo in there).
So why are we re-investing in Zimbra Desktop?
Simple, email clients have seen no innovation in the past 20 years. For customers already running the Zimbra Collaboration back-end, we’re going to add some unique enhancements through Zimbra Desktop (as well as our other user experiences). Today your choices are limited – there are some great browser-based email clients – we like to count ours as one of those – but if you want a client that runs on your computer, there really aren’t a whole lot of choices. With our background in building social user experiences, we believe there are some interesting opportunities to reinvent some of the common user experiences around collaboration too.
So, Zimbra Desktop 7.2.5 is just the start and a brand new user experience for Zimbra Desktop is currently in development, with a planned release date for later this year.
Hello – this is stunning news. We were making plans to migrate everyone to either the web client or Outlook using the hopefully new EWS feature in Zimbra 9.
Are the HTML5 offline plans still in the works, or are those being scrapped to develop ZD more? Also, are you planning to change ZD from “Jetty in a box” to a real application running natively on the OS?
Great news!
We stopped using Zimbra Desktop a long time ago. We use Zimbra in an environment in which users move between desktops frequently.
Each time a user logged into a desktop that they hadn’t used in a day or more, it took a long time to synch up and index, which made it appear that mail was not being delivered to the clients.
The Zimbra web interface is awesome though. Don’t change a thing, except may add a built-in chat tool similar to Lotus Sametime.
Invaluable! We have to have an offline client. Switching back to outlook from zdesktop was a kick in the pants for us! Can’t wait for the updated version.
That’s great news. I hope you add a method like outlook that email fetching can be done as needed so that you don’t need a initial sync that is painfully long.and another thing is the storage needed on client shouldnt be as big as the mailbox store.
I like it how the emclient with imap works. There you fetch the list of emails and emails are downloaded om the fly when you look at it.
Is it support to windows 64bit?
Great Going……
Being in Sales & Marketing…Provided ZIMBRA Solution to Many Customers ..Most of them using Different Mail Client. But now will surely Insist Zimbra Desk Top Client ……
ALL THE BEST for More INNOVATiONS
We have a number of customers using Zimbra Desktop, so this is welcome news. It’s a little disappointing that virtually every design theme was removed in the 7.2.5 release, but we’ve been explaining to customers who have asked that it’s part of the transition to a version of Zimbra Desktop that’s actively being developed.
I think our customers most value the ability to have a reasonable alternative to Outlook for the PC/Mac to get off of the Outlook upgrade treadmill & it’s associated costs. I’m interested to see how a future release of Zimbra Desktop correlates with some of the previous discussions about creating an HTML 5 Zimbra web mail app with offline capabilities, assuming those plans are still in motion.
This is fantastic news!!!! I love ZD, especially if you work somewhere using GMAIL you can use ZD for real productivity gains.
This is truly great news!! The Zimbra desktop will offer a valuable bargaining chip when addresing potential clients. And of cource make many current users very happy.
@David Killingsworth: There is already a great built in chat feature provided by VNC. VNCtalk can be used to talk conveniently by chat, audio or video. Conversation groups can consist of two or more members, and new conversation partners can be invited easily at any time all from your Zimbra UI
Very glad to hear Zimbra Desktop will be better by developed again. Please prioritise a proper (unlimited) email signature feature with embedded graphics – that and the inability to insert images inline we’re why I had to move back to Outlook (with its terribly poor IMAP performance).
I”ll await the good news later in the year but won’t be reinstalling until both of the above ‘must have’ features have been added.
Hi Ed – that inline images (copy/paste) are already part of what we’re adding for Zimbra Desktop 8.5. I’ll check on the signatures too.
Randy – we’re adding back the themes in a future release. Had a little snafu and had to remove them last minute.
jack – it should support Windows 64 bit
Thor – we’re working through a number of new features and innovations to Zimbra Desktop. This release is really just getting things moving again. We’re prototyping a capability right now that many people who move from Outlook have asked for repeatedly: better support for PST files.
David – stay tuned, you may see a chat feature yet :-)
Drew – HTML 5 offline support is still part of the mainline Zimbra Collaboration Server release due out later this year. Unfortunately not all browser types will be supported (as the support for HTML 5 offline storage varies).
Great news! Thanks so much zimbra! Do you think zimbra desktop 8.5 can be upgraded from a 7.2.x installation without loosing configured accounts? Also, are you doing something to handle better spellchecker dictionary support? In 7.x series as you know one has to edit some files manually and each upgrade overwrites user edits!
Thanks!
Thanks Rob – I’m really looking forward to having a proper alternative to Outlook at last!
OH MY – finally some sense. Hopefully with Telligent now in charge we will see some more listening to customer needs. Was really a kick in the butt, when we were told no more Z Desktop. TA!!!
Thanks Rob!!! This is very exciting. I’m the IT for several companies that use Zimbra and seeing Zimbra Desktop EOL was very very sad for me and some of my clients. THIS IS FANTASTIC!!!
Do you know if it is possible to make Zimbra Desktop the default mail client in Windows 8/8.1? That is the biggest thing broken on it right now for me.
Thanks again, I’m really excited to see Zimbra Desktop 8.5.
Whoohoo !
Z’s not dead baby :)
Great news, as ZD is one of the reasons why we choose Zimbra for our customers.
Just dreaming about features for the future of ZD/Zimbra :
– a better file hosting solution, with local OS file-explorer integration, offline cache and zimbra sharing integration, a-la DropBox (the existing one is very old-featured)
– an (even simple) chat/messaging integrated solution.
Michel,
We have plans for a Zimbra file sync and share solution to endpoint devices as well as a Zimbra Chat Solution. These would be available in both the web client and Zimbra Desktop.
Ed Cal’,
If you cannot wait for Zimbra Desktop 8.5 you can give a try to Zimbra Desktop based on Google Chrome.
I need to debug why language settings it’s not being saved but apart from that it seems to work as well as always.
Here: Open Zimbra Desktop in Google Chrome – Comment #15 you can see how you can copy graphics without the need of copying them from a web browser.
Not sure if it will do actual graphics inline inserting by the means of pasting an image (and even inside signatures) but it’s worth a try.
Download: Zimbra Desktop based on Google Chrome 0.03 for windows
Just in case it’s not clear:
You first need to install Zimbra Desktop, run it and quit it.
Then, if needed, install Google Chrome.
Then you install Zimbra Desktop based on Google Chrome and run it.
It will open Zimbra Desktop using Google Chrome as a backend and you will see that Zimbra Desktop speed improves a lot too.
Hopefully Zimbra Desktop 8.5 is based on Chromium embedded, latest Firefox or another technology.
Some must have features like , Automated Local Email Archiving & Import .PST should be considered to make Zimbra Desktop a powerful competition to MS Outlook.
Excellent news. When we had Zimbra demonstrated to us – it was with Zimbra Desktop. Shortly after we purchased, the EOL notice went up. While the web client is fine in a pinch – we never quite liked it near as much as Zimbra Desktop. In fact, we kept Outlook with the connector which has it’s own share of issues.
Great work – very happy Telligent is making this move.
Exciting news! I LOVE that you are brining Zimbra Desktop back to us. A LOONNNNGGG awaited announcement. Mobile use is great, but we still
REQUIRE a good DESKTOP email client. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.
this is great news. when will you support mbox file format as well ?
thanks
This is great news. I use the Desktop at home on my MAC for both my Zimbra NE work account and my Comcast (Zimbra based)home accounts. Lately, I have found the start-up screen to take a long time to open and may not work without closing and re-starting over again and again. If not for that quirk, this is the most awesome client for displaying email of all types in one place. At work, we use a combination of Outlook, ZDC, and ZWC for email access in a Windows only environment. I also have to use the Reset-GAL a lot for the People search to work. Hopefully you can fix these minor annoyances in upcoming releases.
Thanks!!!
I prefer ZD’s usability and snappier performance compared to the ZCS web UI. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in ZD 7.2.5 that prevents me from using ZD at the moment, as composing new messages is not possible. See my blog post (i.e. the addendum) about the error. I hope ZD 7.2.6 with this bug fixed will be released soon. Thanks!
Great to hear that inline images are to be supported properly in the Desktop Client. But could you please fix the bug on the server side that sends them with the incorrect content-disposition? It affects both the desktop client and web client.
https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=90498
Hooray! I lamented the decision to EOL Zimbra Desktop but am so glad to see you’ve turned around on this one – great decision!
Fantastic News,
Been looking for a better option to replace MS Outlook for years, found ZD a couple of years ago, but the lack of proper (unlimited) email signature feature with embedded graphics, limited my use to to read only when out of the office. And after a few months, the data files got so big on my 2 TB drive, that it filled it up and I had to go back to using Outlook 2010. Since then I made the mistake of upgrading to OL 2013, and it’s about the worst ever version to use !! Welcome back ZD !!!
I hope the new versions of ZDesktop will have a look and feel closer to the browser version. I hate how some buttons are in different places in the desktop.
Patrick, short-term no, long-term yes. As I said in an earlier post we’re just getting the project going again. We are starting work on the next release now and that version will have a UX similar to what we are using in Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.5.
MarkB – my goal is to make this the replacement for Outlook. For example, one of the features we’re currently working on is local PST import for ZD. Currently this is a server only function.
Martin – I’ll go flag this bug now. We definitely need to address that.
Well, well, it’s good to know that there will still have a B plan with ZD but I really hope the biggest work will made on the new Web Client with htlm 5 and cache system. THAT is the future so I think ;o)
Christophe – yes, that is part of the ZCS 8.5 product. HTML Offline – you can download beta 2 and try it yourself. I don’t believe IE works, so only FF and Chrome.
that is really good,,,
we have been waiting for this long time.
thank you, zimbra team
Hello. I have downloaded Zimbra Desktop 7.2.5 GA, and I am wondering if there is anyway to increase the font interface on a mac (10.6.8) The font is really small, even with reading glasses. I have used cmd +, but that is a temporary thing that needs to be done upon starting the app.
I would appreciate any information that someone is able to provide.
Thank you in advance for your time.
Hi Lisa, thanks for commenting. I am getting an answer to your question, and I will respond as quickly as possible.
Hello again Lisa-
Unfortunately, Zimbra Desktop (ZD) does not have an option for changing font style or size. That feature was introduced into Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.x, but has not made it into ZD yet.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Yes! This is great news!!
It’s great to have ZD back, especially for people who want to archive huge/old mails locally. However there are some isssues with contact groups; I generated bug 95574 and from what I can see other people have related problems.
Great stuff! Been struggling with ZD 7.2.5 (Mac OS). Can’t sync with Google contacts? It seems to be only one way sync Google to Zimbra. If I create or modify within Zimbra it will not sync to Google. I’ve ‘googled’ and can’t find a solution.
Still looking for a less sluggish client, I have worked with Outlook 2013 and Zimbra Desktop 7.2.5 is needs a lot of work. I simply used Outlook 2013 for managing the zimbra emails.
Please work on the desktop client so it can compete with outlook
Is there any status update on the release of ZD 8.5? We are in the process of testing Zimbra and that would be a welcome addition.
Thanks,
Daniel
It’s been around 5.5 months since this was announced and I haven’t seen any other news of Zimbra Desktop since. I’m starting to get a little worried, especially because on the download page, there are betas of previous versions. Any news? I also have several clients I would LOVE to upgrade as soon as a newer ZD is available. No one seems to like the latest version of Outlook (2013), and I’ve never been an Outlook fan. Thanks again for working on this great client.
Yes, we are actively working on the next version of Zimbra Desktop. We hope to have a release in early 2015.
Rob
EXCELLENT!!!
Thank you again for the quick reply, and for your continued work on this client, I’m very excited about it!!!
Jared
I have a problem in installing ZIMBRA Desktop in my windows 32 bit pc. Error msg contains zdrun.vbs error. application configuration is incorrect.
Hi Ilesh,
I recommend following up with the question in our Zimbra community: community.zimbra.com
Bringing back the Twilight theme that zebra stripes the email header list and 64 bit support would be aces. Hope to see some inventive stuff too. Conquer the info.
Just started using ZD with my new hosted Zimbra account; wow. Stability and reliability at last, with full calendar and address book, on every platform I use, no plugins or questionable code involved. Very happy indeed to see this working so well. I do hope that inline images (and copy/paste of them) can be supported sometime soon :-)
Hi Rob,
do you think you’ll have a ZD 8.5 release by at least the end of January 2015 ?
Thanks in advance
Hi Marco,
No I don’t think we’ll have it ready by January, but definitely later in the year. I can’t give a definitive date.
Rob
Having to use the old insecure Java 1.6 is starting to create more and more problems as Java is used more and more for me.
does not install on 32bit windows machines, gives “application configuration is incorrect” error. reproducible across several desktops running xp and win7. waste of time…
Hi Rob,
I see that from your product roadmap it looks like the desktop release is pushed way out? Can you provide us with an update? Thanks!
Hi Peter, Let me see what info I can get for you on this matter.
Thanks,
Matthew
Thanks! Just so people know what I found: http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/212115/file-2452880015-pdf/pdf_files/2015_Roadmap_Update_-_Feb_2015_FINAL.pdf?t=1423629422828
Peter, thanks again for the question on Zimbra Desktop. Currently we are looking at a general availability timeframe of summer 2015 (calendar year) for ZD 7.3. We are working on the specifications for ZD 8.0, but at this time do not have an ETA on GA.
We always value input, if you have any thoughts or feedback, please head over to ZD’s community https://community.zimbra.com/desktop/
hat is really good???
ZD 8.5?
Great news. Matthew. I will stay tuned!
Is it safe to say we will have a ZD 7.3 release by the end of July 2015 ? Do you think you’ll release a beta version before ?
Thanks!
Hi Marco, at this time, summer 2015 is the most specificity I can provide.