CalendarReview

Zimbra, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server that was acquired by Yahoo this past September, has released version 5.0 of its collaboration suite. The upgrades are various and wide-reaching, with support finally here for the BlackBerry and several improvements made to Zimbra’s browser-based email client.

In addition to managing their email, calendars and contacts, customers can now use Zimbra’s browser-based client to instant message, collaborate on documents via wiki, and share files. Yahoo search functionality, and local search in particular, has been integrated into the browser-based client as well, enabling users to search Yahoo Maps from within their email interface. Read more in this Techcrunch article.

Zimbra is acquired by Yahoo! for USD 350 million:

The Zimbra Team is pleased to announce we have been acquired by Yahoo!

Yahoo! is acquiring Zimbra to extend its leadership and reach new customers in the business, education, and service provider markets across the globe. This major opportunity for Zimbra will accelerate our growth using Yahoo!’s worldwide reach, create a larger combined community, plus enable us to build even more powerful experiences together.

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Techcrunch news: Zimbra will announce a new offline client application, Zimbra Desktop, later this week. It will allow Zimbra users to access and use Zimbra’s email and other office applications, in the browser, when offline. For the  post and  podcast interview with  Zimbra Co-Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj  go here.

PC World interview with Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra’s ebullient cofounder and chief executive officer

Open-source collaboration software vendor Zimbra is adopting an intriguing approach to taking on proprietary titans like Microsoft and Google, using its channel partners as its competitive muscle.

The aim is for Zimbra to step completely out of directly selling the commercial versions of its products so the startup can focus fully on software development and support, according to Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra’s ebullient cofounder and chief executive officer.

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Zimbra users have been asking for how they can take the Zimbra AJAX UI offline. Today at Web 2.0 Zimbra demo’d this for the first time. Any actions done offline will be stored in the local cache until you are back online. This will work for their email, calendaring, contacts, and documents offerings.

ZCS 4.0.3 includes fixes for 55 bugs and enhancements. It has significant improvements in calendar behavior and fixes a bug in Trash folder viewing that was troubling many folks. It also includes upgrade speed improvements. This allows the upgrade to take much better advantage of installs that have multiple disks available to MySQL.

Dave Rosenberg of Infoworld wrote this article on his problems to use shared calendars:

We’re having a painful time trying to figure out how to do shared calendaring across Mac and Linux users. Exchange (which we have no reason to use anyway) doesn’t really work with iCal. We had unsolvable problems with Zimbra’s iSync component (I am still hoping this will get resolved with their new release) and our attempts at using shared Dav calendars seem to be mediocre at best.

Zimbra is an open source Web Office vendor. It started off in 2005 as an email/calendar collaboration toolset, big on mashup functionality and Web 2.0 hype. Zimbra has since added word processor and spreadsheet to its product range, meaning it now closely resembles a Web Office suite. 

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0 was launched last month, featuring Zimbra Documents - a WYSIWYG tool for creating, sharing, and publishing word and spreadsheet documents online. Other features in ZCS 4.0 include synch to mobile devices, VoIP integration, user access controls. The ZCS 4.0 Open Source Edition of Zimbra is free, and the commercially-supported Network Edition is $28/mailbox/year.

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What Zimbra says about itself:

Zimbra is an open source server and client technology for next-generation enterprise messaging and collaboration. Zimbra delivers innovation for both the administrator and the end-user as well as compatibility with existing infrastructure and applications (both open source and proprietary).

Our solutions are supported cross-platform, including Linux, Unix, Mac OS X on the server-side; Windows, Linux and Mac desktops; and Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer browsers. Key customers we work with include Fortune 1000 enterprises, particularly in the financial services, retail and manufacturing sectors, and higher education institutions.