This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Introducing Zimbra

More than Just Email

Over the last few years, the collaboration market space has become increasingly more competitive. Collaboration Suites focus on creating a messaging infrastructure that not only includes email, but focuses on facilitating communication and collaboration through email, calendar sharing, document sharing, and contact sharing. One thing to keep in mind though, is that the idea of a Collaboration Suite is not new. In fact, these suites have been around for almost as long as email hit the mainstream market.

In the late 1980s, a joint effort between Lotus Development Corporation and Iris

Associates produced the first mainstream collaboration suite called Lotus Notes.

Not only was Notes a vehicle to send and receive emails, it also allowed for group calendaring (not only being able to use your own calendar but also sharing it with co-workers and handle meeting requests), NNTP news support (the ancestor of the well known web-fora), and instant messaging between clients. As Lotus Notes evolved, it became a cleaner and more robust system. However, it also began experiencing some tough competition from other vendors that were seeing the benefits and the marketability of true Collaboration Suites.

In 1997, Microsoft released version 5.0 of its popular Microsoft Exchange suite that, like Notes, was also more than just email. Along with email services, it offered web-based access and included Microsoft Scheduler+ for group calendaring and scheduling. Through the years, both Notes and Exchange have undergone major version upgrades and continue to add additional functionality with every new release.

Collaboration Suites seem to be coming from all directions and offer many of the same functionalites as the big players. Although many of these Collaboration Suites have hit the market over the last several years, one has taken the Collaboration Suite market by storm and as of this writing, has over 8 million paid mailbox (plus 12 million for ComCast alone) subscribers and continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. This suite is called Zimbra Collaboration Suite or ZCS.

Introducing Zimbra

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) was developed to provide a reliable, scalable, and cost effective messaging infrastructure that includes:

•Integrated anti-spam and anti-virus

•Web and Desktop based email clients

•Comprehensive calendaring

•Contact management

•Document sharing

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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Chapter 1

•Multi-domain support

•Over-the-air synchronization to mobile devices

•Comprehensive search functionality of headers, message body, and attachments

•Ability to categorize messages using user-defined "Tags"

ZCS is currently offered in three different editions to allow for flexibility to businesses of differing needs. Below is a sampling of the differences between the editions. For a more comprehensive matrix of the different product editions, please check the Zimbra website at www.zimbra.com.

ZCS Product Edition Comparison

	Open Source	Network	Network
	Edition	Standard Edition	Professional
			Edition
AJAX interface	included	included	included
HTML "light" interface	included	included	included
Mail and Address Book	included	included	included
Search – Basic and Advanced	included	included	included
Tags	included	included	included
Calendaring	included	included	included
Zimlets – mash ups	included	included	included
Attachment Search		included	included
Document Sharing	included	included	included
Online Backup and Restore		included	included
Clustering		included	included
Multi-domain Support	included	included	included
Domain-level administration		included	included
Outlook/MAPI sync			included
Apple iSync			included
Zimbra Mobile		optional	optional
Archiving and Discovery		optional	optional
IM	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0
Tasks management in WebUI	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0
BlackBerry compatibility		optional in 5.0	optional in 5.0
iZimbra	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0	will be in 5.0

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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Kliwon Klimis on 28th October 2008 425 cilce, , frood, grradt, 525254

Introducing Zimbra

As you can see, all of the editions are designed to facilitate collaboration. However, the Network Professional Edition was created as an Enterprise-level tool that gives the organization full access to all of the features Zimbra has to offer. For most organizations, the key benefit of the Network Professional Edition versus the Open

Source and Network Standard Editions is the ability to integrate with Microsoft

Outlook. Integration with Microsoft Outlook, as well as all of the other features ZCS has to offer, makes ZCS a true replacement for any of the more costly collaboration suite solutions including Microsoft Exchange.

Each edition has a different pricing structure, with the Open Source Edition being distributed under open source licensing terms, and the Network Standard and

Professional editions offering per user pricing. Specific pricing for each edition may be found at the Zimbra website. This book will be focusing on the Network Professional Edition, as it encompasses all of the Zimbra features. That being the case, it is recommended readers have access to the Network Professional Edition software. A free trial of the suite may be downloaded from

http://www.zimbra.com.

ZCS was first developed as an open source project, built on open source tools and technologies. With its start as an open source project, Zimbra has developed strong relationships with other open source companies such as Red Hat and MySQL.

Zimbra also has been a strong contributor to other open source projects such as the Open Ajax Alliance. What does all this mean to the organization? Because the ZCS code has been made publicly available, the code has been exposed to public view and has been scrutinized by many developers and users in the open source community.

This makes the code more secure and reliable. Also, by being open source, Zimbra is constantly being enhanced by a vast amount of developers in the open source community, providing opportunities for a global research and development team.

What's in a Name?

So where does the name Zimbra come from? At first glance, most people believe Zimbra is a name with some deeper meaning in another language, as that seems to be the trend with many open source projects. For example, the Linux distribution

Ubuntu is an African word meaning "humanity to others", and the popular Content Management System, Joomla!, is a Swahili word meaning "as a whole". Unfortunately, the name Zimbra really has no meaning. So for those of you looking for some ammunition for your next cocktail party, the name Zimbra really comes from a song called "I Zimbra" by the Talking Heads.

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