Announcing Zimbra Desktop 1.0 – the Next-Generation Email Client

With more than 2.4 million downloads, 7,500 forum posts and two years in the making it’s been a long road to this point… we are now happy to announce the general availability of Zimbra Desktop.

The free Windows, Mac, and Linux download is available now.

Century 21 agents spend many hours a day away from their reliable office network connections. The introduction of Zimbra Desktop allows us to continue reducing our dependence on Microsoft Outlook while retaining the superior Zimbra collaboration platform that we can now use wherever and whenever we need it. — Marge Patterson, Vice President CENTURY 21 Realty Group Companies

A lot of work and fine tuning has been done to create the best possible companion to the Zimbra AJAX Web experience, throughout that process your feedback has been invaluable!

For those less familiar, Zimbra Desktop is unique because it gives you centralized access to your Zimbra email inbox (or inboxes from virtually any external source)- plus your calendar, contacts, documents, tasks and briefcase- whether you are online or offline. We think it is the most advanced email application available, a hybrid combining the best qualities of traditional mail clients with a modern webmail experience, and the first to elegantly marry local and cloud storage so all communication information is at a user’s fingertips.

Since Zimbra Desktop supports any email account (plus contacts and calendars for Yahoo! and Google) we hope it’s the most convenient way to keep you organized and in touch with coworkers, friends and family. Additionally, with the latest Zimbra technologies, including faster indexed search, conversation views and tagging, you can easily handle large inboxes and quickly find important pictures, documents or messages from people you care about.

With Zimbra Desktop filling a big gap between free email applications with basic functionality and premium applications that may be cost prohibitive, we have seen a steady list of customers embrace the product, including Red Hat, Gyro International and 21st Century Realty Group. Zimbra Desktop gives their employees a better overall experience, provides offline “airplane mode” capabilities, works cross-platform and makes life easier for their IT departments by backing up end-user desktop data in the cloud.

Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer at Red Hat recently shared his impressions on Zimbra and Zimbra Desktop:

“We recently swapped out our legacy email and calendar systems for Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which has received high marks throughout the company, and with the general availability of Zimbra Desktop, we can now offer all of our employees a sleek solution for both Web-based and desktop communication. We are especially pleased that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is based on open source technology and that it performs very effectively in our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.”

We have always been dedicated to offering our customers freedom of choice to meet your diverse collaboration needs for work, school, or home, and Zimbra Desktop brings your most important communications to you in one place, wherever you are. Zimbra Desktop is free for anyone to use whether you are a Zimbra customer or not. (Zimbra customers have an additional benefit of support from us when using Zimbra Desktop with a Zimbra email account).

Download Zimbra Desktop today and take your email, calendar, and contacts with you on any plane, train, or automobile!