Posts Tagged ‘zimbra’

Gmail Gets Drag-and-Drop

gmail-drag-n-drop I love the Gmail interface, but one of the things that I miss going from my Zimbra accounts at work to Gmail is that there’s no drag-and-drop. Well, that all changed when I logged into my account today. I don’t know that I would call drag-and-drop in a web email client a killer feature, necessarily, but as Google works to make web applications feel more like desktop applications, features like drag-and-drop will become more and more important. I was actually surprised that it took this long for them to bring this feature to Gmail. In a world where the push is to mix cloud and desktop applications, having these interfaces the same is going to be crucial.

The drag-and-drop interface does leave a bit to be desired as you actually have to grab a handle to the left of the message rather than just grabbing the message itself, but it’s something. I would expect that you would be able to just click and hold on either the subject or the sender within the interface to grab the message as this is the behavior in most desktop clients, but we will see.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jul 2nd, 2009

Native Zimbra Syncing to OS X Snow Leopard, But Not The Way We All Thought

One of the biggest features that Apple is touting of the new version of OS X is native Exchange integration. Native Exchange integration is a great feature for Apple since not even Windows offers it. Being a Zimbra fan, I was hoping that Snow Leopard had implemented this via ActiveSync rather than Exchange’s Web Services. It turns out that this is not the case, but it looks like we may still get native syncing just not the way we all thought.

According to a Zimbra forum thread, this will likely happen via CardDAV and CalDAV. Zimbra has CardDAV support slated for version 6.01 which is supposedly scheduled around the same time as Snow Leopard. One of the new, not-so-hyped features of Snow Leopard is the use of CardDAV for Address Book Server along with (of course) support for CardDAV on the client side. OS X as well as Zimbra have supported CalDav for some time so calendar syncing. While it’s not quite as simple as we would have liked, it appears we’re still getting the native syncing that we were hoping for, just not the way that seemed obvious from the beginning.

Update: As @thebitnix points out, it’s not a bad thing that native sync with Zimbra isn’t happening via the Exchange protocols. It was just unexpected that it would happen via different methods.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jun 19th, 2009

Zimbra 6.0 Beta: A first look

Over the weekend Zimbra announced the availability of the first beta of its new version 6.0 collaboration suite. The release is expected to be in a production-ready state and is this beta was the public’s first view of the suite. The new beta seems to focus mostly on new user preferences and polishing off the interface. The list of new features is quite extensive, but of note for users that I’ve heard from so far are:

  • Compose message has been moved to a tab – you can compose a message, flip to another tab, and come back to the compose tab without saving as draft
  • The ability to run new mail filters over existing mail folders
  • A new share discovery interface that shows shares that are available to you as well as shares that are created for your account

share-discovery-ui

  • Zimlet management for allowed Zimlets in the Preferences tab of the web client
  • Ability to attach documents to an email directly from the Briefcase
  • IM moved from a tab along the top to the bottom
  • Per-user blacklists and whitelists right from within the Preferences tab of the web client

user-blacklist-whitelist

There are also a number of new features on the administrative backend, including a new logger service and the addition of  a “Delegated admin” for the Network Edition which is a domain administrator can be allowed to manage multiple domains instead of being limited to a single domain.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Apr 21st, 2009

Zimbra’s User Count Exceeds Gmail

Just a couple of months ago, Zimbra reported that it had exceeded 20 million paid mailboxes and just now has announced it reached 40 million, surpassing the number of Gmail users. Zimbra, of course, is not quite in the same game as Gmail since Zimbra only offers its hosted solution for educational users, but one can get Zimbra hosted through a reseller. The software can also be downloaded and run on a local mail server at a company’s location.

Zimbra’s competition lies more in the paid Gmail mailboxes or in Microsoft Exchange, but surpassing the number of Gmail users is a great feat. A vast majority of the users have been educational as well as included in a deal with Comcast to offer their customers a hosted Zimbra account with each Internet subscription. What’s not included in the count, however, are a number of Zimbra open source users. Zimbra offers its core software for free as well as some additional features in the pay-for version which was the version counted. There really is not a way to count the number of non-paid mailboxes which could sum up to be quite a few mailboxes as well, but there’s really no telling.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 9th, 2009

Zimbra Adds Reminder Zimlets

Zimbra has been gaining popularity as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange for some time, but its real power is in its ZImlet extension functionality. Last week they added a killer Zimlet to their arsenal as well as a new Zimlet this week that will be very handy and both revolve around helping us not forget things, a problem any busy person faces. :) Last week’s Zimlet was an email reminder Zimlet. The extension allows you to set a reminder to respond to an email so it’s not forgotten. This is a great replacement to my error-prone system of marking items as unread that I need to remember to respond to. For instance, let’s say I get an email that a subscription or license to something will be expiring in a few months. Rather than placing an event in my calendar and possibly missing the reminder after the date goes by, I can set a reminder that I need to do something about that email later on. For me, this is a killer feature as I often forget to respond to emails that don’t necessarily need to be responded to right away. The second reminder Zimlet is a birthday reminder. It allows you to remind you of a birthday of one of your contacts and set multiple reminders before the birthday so you don’t have to worry about forgetting a birthday and get yourself into trouble :) Both of these new Zimlets require ZCS 5.0.12 or greater for the server-side or you can install them into Zimbra Desktop as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 19th, 2009

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