The future of collaboration, starts today
I have been waiting for today, the release of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5. It is the first major Zimbra Collaboration release since we acquired Zimbra from VMware last year.
Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 lays a foundation for the next evolution of mobile-first, cloud-enabled collaboration and completes many of the Zimbra roadmap commitments that were made to customers while Zimbra was with VMware.
To help our customers and partners better meet changing user needs, Zimbra put some serious development time behind both the customer-facing user experience and the back-end architecture.
New Feature Highlights
- Touch client for tablets and smartphones: The secure, HTML5 mobile web application provides a device-specific user experience for Android and iOS devices. The Zimbra touch client can be tailored through open APIs and fully white labeled. It delivers anytime, anywhere mailbox access, through a unique Zimbra experience, that keeps people connected to their data.
- Offline Web client: Offline Web client support for Chrome and Firefox keeps Zimbra users connected, even when not taking advantage of native HTML5 data storage support. Users get the ability to work offline with access to one month’s worth of data. And, IT administrators benefit from an offline client that doesn’t increase the cost or management associated with a full desktop client.
- Exchange Web Services: The latest release adds new Exchange Web Services (EWS) support, enabling all mail, contacts, tasks and calendar functionality in Outlook for Mac. Administrators can add Outlook for Mac to the list of supported clients for BYOD environments, and users get to choose whatever Mac desktop client they prefer.
- Zimbra Social integration: Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 includes integrated support for Zimbra Social. Customers running both Zimbra products benefit from a shared user experience and single sign-on. Keeping employees connected to all of the collaboration touch points.
- Document preview: High fidelity document preview is now available, allowing users to preview documents in their Web browser.
Infrastructure Enhancements
- Active-active: Active-active is part of a multi-release effort to increase Zimbra Collaboration’s scale and performance capabilities in complex Zimbra deployments. This encompasses a number of enhancements to the web application and server architecture, and introduces support for MariaDB. Zimbra Collaboration 9.x will continue this investment, helping eliminate downtime due to upgrades, maintenance or unplanned outages.
Feature Enhancements
- Zimbra Connector for Microsoft Outlook (ZCO): The Zimbra Connector for Microsoft Outlook (ZCO) provides real-time, two-way syncing of mail, contacts, tasks and calendars between Outlook and Zimbra. The latest release adds support for traditional Chinese and improvements for system administrators including: syncing, connection security and share message support. Administrators can better support and troubleshoot issues with logging improvements. Users can now accept shared mail folders and calendars from Outlook without opening the Zimbra Web client and will notice improved performance when syncing a large number of messages.
- ActiveSync Performance and Scalability Enhancements: Service providers running large-scale ActiveSync deployments will benefit from decreased computing resource costs and increased user density per server. Administrators can now add BlackBerry 10 devices to the list of ActiveSync-enabled devices that are supported for BYOD environments..
I’m very excited about what we are building at Zimbra and, with the addition of the Mezeo platform to the product portfolio, there will be some great product updates and advancements integrating sync and share into your daily work life, down the road. Stay tuned for more on that, but for now, head over to the Zimbra Collaboration product page and download the latest copy. @robhoward
Hi Rob, today is a big day for every of one that love Zimbra products. Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.5 is a really mature product and also the new improvements are very nice and business oriented.
I had the opportunity for work with the Beta of this product and it was like GA.
I’ve wrote a welcome post too, for Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.5 in Spanish, http://www.jorgedelacruz.es/2014/08/26/zimbra-zimbra-collaboration-server-8-5-0-es-ahora-ga/
Long life to Zimbra
Great News.
Looking forward to it, more refined, responsive, a raft of long-term bugs quashed – a huge step forward for Zimbra.
Of course, we’re already thinking about 9.0!
At Olan Trust we’re planning a whole host of new Zimlets that other nonprofits, as well as small businesses and individual users may find useful.
We’re hoping that integration with Zimbra Community might include a linux server-based future for Community, and lower cost for nonprofits/small business users (who have too many users for the free Community offering).
Zimbra 8.5 release was much awaited, Its features will help BSP’s like us.
Hi Rob,
Yes it’s a nice day for the customer and partner!
Zimbra is the future of messaging.
I wrote a post in French,
http://www.calyce.fr/blog/zimbra-collaboration-85-anytime-anywhere-any-device
Nice!
Really happy about this update, also noticed CentOS7/RHEL7 is supported!
That’s great because it means if we decided to upgrade the server, the OS will be supported.
Thank you to all of Zimbra team for this great update and hopefully many more to come.
We will be updating our server to 8.5 soon, but first I’ll have to get some plans together and ready in case anything goes wrong etc.
I’m sure you know the drill haha.
Anyhow, thanks for the update guys!
Realy great! Infomais BSP tks a lot!
Thanks to everyone for the supportive comments. We look forward to what future releases hold and sharing with the Zimbra community.
Love active, active and the support for MariaDB. Nice work team.
Great job team! Excited to see the product leap forwards again.
How will the new offline system differ from Zimbra Desktop?
It sounds like I’ll be losing the ability to have the entire mailbox of my 40+ accounts locally… why?
I love the increased support for active-active.
I think I’m finally starting to understand Zimbra Community. What are its competitors (to better understand what it does)? What about some demo sites?
I look forward to the Mezeo integration.
Thanks for the question Mike. Let me get with the team and get you an answer.
To better understand the Zimbra Community product, take a look through some of the features. It is a powerful, software platform designed to meet a myriad of needs both internal and external, e.g., product ideation, customer support, or even something as simple as sharing of ideas and updates.
Hi Mike,
We are committed to Zimbra Desktop. Prior to our acquisition, While at VMWare, Zimbra Desktop was considered ‘end of life’. We released a new version of Zimbra Desktop this summer and in the process of preparing the next release of Zimbra Desktop. The offline support is simply another option for managing email offline. It is not a replacement of Zimbra Desktop.
Zimbra Community competes with other social software products such as Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive, etc. It is a social platform that provides alternative styles of collaboration (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.).
We are planning some exciting integration with Mezeo – both for Zimbra Community and Zimbra Collaboration – and will have more details to share around that in the very near future.
Hope that helps!
Rob
I’ve wrote a two Blog Posts for doing a good upgrade:
Upgrade from Zimbra 8.0.7 to 8.5.0 in Ubuntu 12.04 – http://www.jorgedelacruz.es/2014/08/27/zimbra-upgrade-zcs-8-0-7-a-zcs-8-5-0-sobre-ubuntu-12-04-lts/
Upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 and then Update Zimbra 8.5.0 – https://www.jorgedelacruz.es/2014/08/27/zimbra-upgrade-ubuntu-12-04-a-ubuntu-14-04-y-update-de-zcs-8-5-0/
I hope that this two how-to helps somebody during upgrade.
Firstly, congratulations.
Just wondering:
1) Any eta for the next version of Zimbra Desktop?
2) Any plans on adding client-side encryption to briefcase in the near future (we want to use it for storage, but want it encrypted on the server, in case the server becomes compromised)
3) At the moment we are running the Open Source edition, and only have 5 employees. Any thoughts about adding a perpetual License for small businesses? Or even, a license simply for outlook support (as that’s all we need from the full version really)?
4) Finally, where is the best place to learn zimlet coding. Its been easy to code some basic ones (based on examples), but I wanted to code something that adds a HTML snippet to the end of every replied email (which I couldn’t really find much assistance on).
Thanks Andrew!
1) Nothing that we’re ready to announce yet, but it is actively being developed.
2) Probably not in Briefcase. With regards to file management/encryption, etc. the bulk of the effort is going into the Mezeo product we acquired last month. Mezeo already supports at-rest / server encryption.
3) We have thought about alternative licensing options. But honestly, I’m not the person to comment on that.
4) Drop me a note at rob@zimbra.com — we do have some doc material we’ve created for Zimlets, but not sure where that is.
Hi
Firstly – excellent news on releasing version 8.5 ZCS as I have been running Zimbra OSE at home happily on Ubuntu for many years now – never had an issue – well nothng that can’t be fixed with community help of course :-)
Secondly – the download link for 8.5 Ubuntu 12.04 64bit is currently not working on the website – see below for error
NoSuchKeyThe specified key does not exist.downloads/8.5.0_GA/zcs-8.5.0_GA_3040.UBUNTU12_64.20140816142548.tgz4CDA2877E6B39355Fv4noA1JNh3UgT9BHC0Z02mRwtPT7pqavGJsY7LGrqjbnoaMGILXcl3OoAP9jg4Lother than that – keep up the excellent work
Hi George,
I just alerted the team and we’re going to investigate what is going on with the Ubuntu download.
Thanks,
Rob
Great news and I’m thrilled to hear it. But I’m curious about the EWS support. If the server supports EWS then why is there still an Outlook Connector? Why can’t Outlook on Windows connect directly to Zimbra 8.5 using EWS? This is the one part of the product that I’ve really had problems supporting in the past and I was looking for it going away.
Hi Pat,
So were we. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to standardize on Exchange Web Services in Windows (it is the how Outlook on the Mac connects though). On Windows Microsoft decided at the last minute to pull EWS and continue to use EAS as the primary protocol for Outlook on Windows.
Rob
In the past we’ve ‘downgraded’ to OSE.
With the release of 8.5, does the new website still have a straight forward feature matrix so I can see plainly what I’m missing out on by not moving back to NE?
Hi Brad,
We should have a feature matrix up soon that highlights the differences between network edition and the OSS edition. The primary differences are features like Exchange Web Services and Active Sync support. The new mobile touch client is only part of the commercial edition too. Although there are many more differentiated capabilities in the works.
However, another important point is that by using the commercial edition you’re enabling us to continue making the investments in the product (beyond all the great stuff we already have planned).
Cheers,
Rob
The problem in installing zcs 8.5 is the port 53 conflict when I install it in my ubuntu 14.04 LTS server
Anybody help me about this issue?
Hi Reymund. I’m Jenn, Zimbra’s community manager. I think I know someone who can help. I’ll send an email to you.
Yes ma’am Jenn, I’ll be waiting for your email to me?
Thank You!
Spnego is broken in this version. Case has been opened at zimbra.
I just don’t understand why authentication dosen’t seem to be in focus.
For example in version before 8.5: spnego authentication error redirection url had the config paramenter implantet,
but it did nothing. If spnego auth fails one should be able to redirect user to a normal login.
I was hoping this release had fixed this problem. But when we tried it, spenego authenication didn’t work at all.
In previous version spnego worked minus auth error redirect.
In 8.5 manual login works ok, even kerberos auth.
Dosen’t anyone else than us, use spnego?
Hi Thor,
I’ll admit, I have not heard of Spnego before. Single sign on (SSO) support is very important to us and supporting authentication standards, such as OAuth, are investments we are committed to.
Rob
Reymund, check your email for some advice on your issue. :)
Jen why don’t you post the solution here ?
I’ve the same problem on a fresh install on ubuntu14.04.
Dob.
Sorry i miss hello all :)
and please Jenn :)
Hello!
I have the same problem new Zimbra 8.5 and Ubuntu 14.04. (Port conflict DNS Cashe 53..) Can you send me an email with solutuion too? THX
@Rob Howard
Thanks. I got word now that spnego will be fixed in 8.5.0 Patch 2.
Hoping you also fixed zimbraSpnegoAuthErrorURL (does nothing)..:
zmprov mcf zimbraSpnegoAuthErrorURL ‘?ignoreLoginURL=0’
Patch will be out in about 2 weeks according to zimbra support.
By the way, EWS feature seems to be an optional addon. I urge you guys to inform your customers about that. I was about to try EWS, nothing worked, and then I read:
http://antisp.in/2014/09/zimbra-8-5-ews/
I got two case numbers on authentication open now:
00125011 SPNEGO SSO and failure to redirect
00161548 Upgrade from Zimbra NE v.8.0.7 to v.8.5.0.GA.3042 breaks SPNEGO with Kerberos (note: spnego is also broken without using kerboros option)
The patch I mentioned above was only for 00125011. So not sure when spnego will be fixed. I hope zimbra don’t do this every time we update.
@Rob any chance you can push on getting this fixed soon?
By the way case 00125011 has been open ridiculous long
Hi Thor,
I’ll check into it right now.
Cheers,
Rob
Ok, thanks Rob. Both case 00125011 and case 00161548, is important to get fixed as soon as possible.
it’s as if I was pissing in a violin, no one to answer my question ?
Ok, not sure what that means, but I’m going to borrow that expression “…as if I was pissing in a violin…” :)
Are you referring to this, “The problem in installing zcs 8.5 is the port 53 conflict when I install it in my ubuntu 14.04 LTS server”?
Dob – please see this post by Jorge. He posted this to the original question, but the WordPress comment didn’t get published for some reason:
https://www.jorgedelacruz.es/2014/09/20/zimbra-resolver-el-error-de-dnscache-y-dnsmasq-en-zimbra-collaboration-8-5/
it’s a french expression meaning that i can piss in a violin whitout interresting someone :)
but thanks for your response i will check this right now.
Thanks again :)
Hi Folks
Having a lot of fun getting our customers to migrate to the latest 8.5 release and really impressed with the differences between 8.5 and earlier versions. I firmly believe that the Desktop Client remains a critical part of the Zimbra package and it’s a great way to use Zimbra with other external accounts should that be required.
Only one little nag – the issue of all Email addresses in the various accounts having to be different. We have the same Email account on several servers, as do some of our customers, and this is a killer for the app. Please, please do something about allowing the client to be setup with more than one account having the same Email address.
Best wishes
Chris
Hi Chris,
Great to hear!
Can you provide a little more detail on, ‘…allowing the client to be setup with more than one account having the same email address…’? I’m not clear on what you mean by the same email account on multiple servers.
You can either post here or drop me a note at rob@zimbra.com.
Thanks,
Rob
Still waiting for spnego fixes…
Hi Thor,
Apologies for not providing an update sooner:
Case: 00125011 (related bug)
Fixed in upcoming 8.6.0 (~December GA)
Case: 00161548 (related bug)
Fixed in 8.5.0 Patch 2 (Available today)
Rob
I can confirm that spnego works after patch :)
Hope zimbraSpnegoAuthErrorURL will be fixed soon. (upcoming 8.6.0 (~December GA))
Rob,
Case: 00125011 (related bug)
in the link you posted I see implementation of two attributes that I’m also missing:
zimbraWebClientLoginURLAllowedIP/zimbraWebClientLogoutURLAllowedIP
But I see no mentioning about zimbraSpnegoAuthErrorURL.
Will zimbraSpnegoAuthErrorURL be fixed together with zimbraWebClientLoginURLAllowedIP/zimbraWebClientLogoutURLAllowedIP?
Snoop spnego test page seems like it doesen’t interpret the code after upgrade+patch.
/service/spnego/snoop.jsp
returns the jsp code to the user
I solved the port 53 conflict for me – i had forgotten to do apt-get update, so the openssh-server was not installed. After doing that it worked like a charm.
Weather it 2010 Exchange account or 2013 Exchange account ?
Zimbra 8.0.7_GA_6021 (build 20140408123948)