If your organization is interested in enhancing Zimbra via communication with external services, adding extra functionality via widgets and application portals, or just wants to increase usability of existing inline content: We cordially invite you to our beautiful (and relatively warm) Sunnyvale, California campus December 15-16th. Whether your somewhat new to basic object oriented JavaScript programming or already familiar with advanced Zimbra specific SOAP, JSON requests, and hooks; our front-end engineers and best mashup gurus will be available to help get your coding started.

Details on this two day course’s agenda and the registration form can be found here: Zimbra-Training-Registration-Zimlet-Course.pdf

-For more information contact us or email training@
-Local Hotel options: Zimbra-Training-Location-Sunnyvale.pdf
-There are partner discounts, though any member of the community is welcome to attend even if you aren’t a network edition customer.
-Can’t make it in December? We’re holding another in February tentatively the 23rd through 24th. Be sure to let us know early if your interested – space is limited and will fill up fast.

We’ve got lots to talk about this year – not only did we cross a huge milestone, reaching 50 million paid mailboxes in less than four years, but we’ve continued to expand our reach in the Edu community (which alone is comprised of millions of paid mailboxes).  New Edu customers this year alone include Eastern Michigan University, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Marietta College, Saint Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Findlay, and Wayne State University.

All of our Edu customers benefit from Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, and many are contributing their own custom mash-ups to make Zimbra’s online tools work for best for them. Institutions like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Simon Fraser University are creating special Zimlets to better serve their students and faculty. You can read more about their specific case studies in our back to school blog series.

Other recent mash-ups include DimDim’s application tab (pictured below), which allow users to access DimDim’s web conferencing services from within Zimbra. Additionally, a new social media Zimlet enables users to read and post tweets to Twitter, or make updates to Facebook and Digg from directly within the ZCS, without having to take the time to visit other websites.

This year we will be joined at the conference by Zimbra customers University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech who will be speaking about how Zimbra has streamlined collaboration across their institutions and discuss how implementing a collaborative email and calendar provider can be extremely cost-effective.

If you are going to be at the conference, don’t forget to check out their panel on Friday, November 6th and please stop by and visit us at booth #332. We will be giving away some great prizes!

We’ve mocked up two new designs just in time for witching hour, and hope to get these into the gallery soon, but we’d also like to inspire you to put your Zimbra in a costume!

 

 

Are you more of a race car driver, a pretty princess, or work in ACU’s and just can’t get enough digital cammo in your email?

Make your Zimbra reflect your mood or keep things interesting with the skin changer Zimlet, which switches themes automatically using whatever frequency preference you set. For even more variety, why not design your own custom theme!

Tell us what other seasonal themes you’d like to see next, even if their half a year away. Prefer a more traditional fall scheme of changing leaves and landscapes? Checkout what others are doing over in the fourms.

So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?

Sync your phone like never before.

We’ve added user trigger-able device wipe, server policies, and tasks to the existing MobileSync support for email, contacts, and appointments.

Arrange and personalize the interface.

Read and compose multiple messages in tabs without the need for pop-out windows using the advanced AJAX client. Widescreen? Move the reading pane to the side.

Presentation Framework.

Create new presentations (as well as documents and spreadsheets) from the briefcase – no need for external software to run them.

 

 

Calendar views. Direct CalDav connections. Streamlined contacts.

Our feature rich UI has new layouts including fisyeye and a sortable list view. Access an external ICS/CalDAV url – with adjustable automatic update polling frequencies. For the address book: Rather than pages of blanks to fill out, add only the contact fields you want.

Lite-client overhauls galore.

The standard HTML client now includes all our primary apps, plus the ability to drag items like it’s AJAX cousin. Using a web-browser on your mobile device? There’s multiple variants based on device type and connection speed. We’ve added appointment management functionality to the portable web-client, a simplified login page, as well as file access.

Role based administration.

Delegate. Empower distribution list managers without worrying about them accidentially changing major server settings. Even let someone add or remove members, but not create or delete existing lists – the views and ACL rights are that customizable. Hosting providers can now give one account permission to manage multiple domains or adjust class-of-service features.

 

 

Connect with your social world.

Zimlets now have the ability to define application or preferences tabs. So use the new Social Zimlet to manage Twitter, Facebook, or just browse Digg. Try the Discover Zimlet to visit all that Del.icio.us has to offer.

Share Management.

Join a new group? Get up to speed fast – receive and an instant email about all the available shares. Didn’t accept that invite long ago but turns out you need something? Rather than digging it up, just use the new share tool to see what you have permissions on; or have given to others.

Server Architecture Improvements.

A few of the powerful under-the-hood changes include a new OpenLDAP engine with the ability to make on the fly config tweaks, SQLite & RRD for logger, customizable hierarchical storage queries. Plus we’ve exposed a UI for the stats service – giving you quick insight on just about everything you can think of.

Someone on the Zimbra freenode channel recently asked: “Why skip the usual numbering scheme?” Well, we felt the above along with several hundred other groundbreaking enhancements made it worthy of a major revision number instead of a more modest 5.5 designation. Be sure to checkout read receipts, browseable company directories (global address list sync folders), on-behalf sending options, print size controls, published (self-enabled) Zimlet settings, fast on-demand/header-first sync in the Outlook connector, and the ability to run filters over existing items.

We’ll have to stop listing improvements there, but the great strides of Zimbra’s growth trajectory can ultimately be traced back to the power of our partner model and community ecosystem. While we don’t reflect Open Source Edition users in our metrics, everyone here certainly recognizes their role in making the Zimbra Server what it is today. So no matter which edition you use, our engineering team invites you to leave us some feedback on version 6.0.1 over in the forums. What features do you want to see implemented next? Let us know below, or test the nightly builds for a glimpse of aspects like pressure based page scrolling, support for the CardDav standard, and the ability to remove attachments but retain an email body; all of which are just a heartbeat away.

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3^rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.

But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25^th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.

We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs.  “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.

Get the latest version of the Social Zimlet from the Gallery

Thanks again for all your support and feedback; hope you enjoy ZCS 6.0!
Network Edition server download | Open Source Edition server download

You can also find a bit more about what’s new in ZCS 6 on the Zimbra website.

Highlights from our Q&A with Rob are below:

How long have you been running Zimbra?
The university started evaluating mail systems in earnest during the 1st quarter of 2008. We went full production for all of our 70,000 users in June 2009.

What’s your favorite Zimlet and why?
One of the most popular is our AccessID Zimlet. Our previous email system did not have an extensible API that would allow us to integrate our directory information into email content. Zimbra’s ability to create context-sensitive events allows our users to mouse-over an internal WSU ID number (which are quite cryptic) and instantly retrieve a name, department, phone, email address, and other data from our directory about the referenced user.

Were there any campus issues in particular that inspired you to leverage mashups?
Integration with student content applications and existing frameworks are where we are seeing the most demand, and thus where we are focusing our development. This includes L-Soft Listserv, a home-grown announcement service, class schedule information and more. Since going live, we have had a steady stream of requests to leverage external systems into the Zimbra user interface. Many of these projects are already well underway.

What are students and/or faculty saying about your Zimlets?
Since we’re very early on in our rollout, every compliment seems to come with another request for more integration work! In the past we have had to turn these requests down, as they were simply not possible with the software at hand. So, we’ve got our work cut out for us, and are very excited to have the opportunity to accomplish them with Zimbra.

   

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The position will be responsible for developer events, training, documentation and ensuring that developers have all they need to make use of the rich APIs Zimbra offers.

- Our forum with over 27,000 members http://www.zimbra.com/forums/

- Our company/developer blog http://www.zimbrablog.com/

- Our developer and admin wiki http://wiki.zimbra.com/

- Our public bug database http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/

- Our public community driven roadmap http://pm.zimbra.com/

- Our web mash-up extensions (zimlet) gallery http://gallery.zimbra.com/

You can apply directly on the job posting here:

http://careers.yahoo.com/jdescription.php?oid=24060

If you have more questions of have someone in mind who you think would be a good fit please feel free to email me.

KevinH at Zimbra.com

-kevin

With “back-to-school” in the air, we thought it was an appropriate time to check in on some of our education customers. Turns out, Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, compatibility with other email clients and campus systems, open technologies, easy branding, administrator-friendly architecture, in both hosted and on-premise deployment options aren’t the only reasons why Zimbra continues to be the #1 choice for education. Today, schools are growing contributors to our highly regarded Zimlet program. With customized mash-ups, more and more educational institutions at all levels are taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source roots and community, by easily integrating ZCS with other online tools that students and faculty interact with daily.

A few universities have recently shared with us some examples of useful implementations:

Wayne State University
Message Authenticity Zimlet: Helps the student confirm the authenticity of a message sent by Wayne administration. Users may choose alternative delivery methods and rate the message’s importance relevance to them in order to provide feedback for future news updates.
AccessID Zimlet: This hover-over Zimlet provides users with a quick look into the university directory, making sense of arcane user ID codes.
Anti-Phishing Zimlet: Beyond just marking something as spam, this Zimlet allows users to report an email as a serious phishing attempt into an automatic tickiting system, so that Wayne administrators can research if other users have inadvertently provided personal information when they shouldn’t, and then report back to the campus about any complaint to be aware of.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Subscription Center Zimlet: This Zimlet acts as the single source for consolidated public calendar information enabling users to search, browse, and subscribe to assorted campus and community calendars.
White Pages Zimlet: This Zimlet integrates an existing directory server to provide various phone number, office location, and home address information of students, faculty, and staff, based on their existing privacy settings.
Help Zimlet: Gives users quick access to custom tailored documentation for the campus community as well as video screencasts demonstrating how to use and configure various features of the Zimbra web interface.

Simon Fraser University
Course Resources/mySFU Zimlet: Content put out by professors for a specific class, and also connects to details on course books, library records, campus news, and more.
Tips & Tricks Zimlet: A customized interface with a daily tidbit of useful info for getting the most out of the Zimbra experience as well as computing accross campus.
Broadcast Alert Zimlet: Gets the word out to anyone with Zimbra currently open or upon next login. With students on the system so often to get work done, it’s a great way to send a critical notice.

Stay tuned and we will continue the series with additional screenshots plus more in depth Q&A with a few Zimbra educational customers.

The channel-focused evolution has been intentional; early on we realized working via Zimbra resellers, hosting partners and systems integrators is the best way Zimbra can satisfy our rapidly growing customer base’s wide-ranging requirements while continuing to grow efficiently.  With this model we’ve been able to increase the number of paid Zimbra customers to over 60,000 organizations, accounting for over 41 million paid mailboxes – the second largest number of paid mailboxes for any email/collaboration product in the U.S.

We certainly couldn’t help deploy or support this number of customers without the involvement of so many valuable Zimbra partners!

Our sales team certainly appreciates the leverage they gain by working hand-in-hand with channel partners.  Given that, we believe finding new ways to work even more closely together will enhance our mutual success and take us to the next level.

Today we’re pleased to take that next step forward by announcing a new Zimbra Partner Program, featuring:

• A new ‘Gold’ tier for our most advanced Zimbra partners
• An updated Partner Portal with new and updated documentation, sales tools and marketing resources
• Improved visibility for our top partners on the Zimbra website
• New opportunities for deal registration
• More Zimbra resources for co-marketing and selling

Please visit our partner website pages for further details (you may also contact or email our channels team).

In the meantime we’ve also been busy launching more than a dozen distribution relationships around the world to provide enhanced services to our network of VARs in the new Zimbra Partner Program.  These new Zimbra distributors include:

• United States: SYNNEX Corporation, as part of the Open Source Channel Alliance, co-sponsored by RedHat
• Europe:  Several distributors including COMMEO and D2B (France), Interactive Ideas (UK), VNC (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), VDEL (Russia and Eastern Europe), and Nordicmind (Scandanavia).
• Middle East & North Africa: Opennet MEA
• South Africa & Sub-Saharan Africa: Linux Warehouse
• Latin America: Red Hat
• Japan: We’re continuing our strong relationship with Sumitomo.

Some of the key VAR benefits from distributors include streamlined process for placing and fulfilling orders, dedicated account managers and communication channels for rapid support, and access to new payment and financing options.  Our sales team will continue to work directly with our VAR partners (and as often as needed, with the end customers).

We believe the new program is right in line with Zimbra’s objectives for 2009 and beyond: continue growing our customer base and revenues, raise customer satisfaction even higher, firmly establish Zimbra as the leading open collaboration platform for businesses, governments, academic institutions and service providers, and finally deliver more than 3/4ths of our revenue and services through our channel partners.

To our existing partners: We want to say again we greatly appreciate everything we’ve done together already and believe the best is yet to come!  We are already getting positive feedback, including Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix hosting who said, “We’re really excited to be a Zimbra Gold Partner. Positive customer feedback about our solution plus more resources from Zimbra combine to enable us to better sell the product to our target market.”

For those interested in partnering with Zimbra to resell, implement or host Zimbra, we look forward to hearing from you soon!