Zimbra Acquired By Yahoo!
September 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday it was announced that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo!. The initial shock of this for me is related to the fact that Plymouth State University just recently released Zimbra to our campus constituents. This changes this tool from a diamond in the rough that we recognized to something clearly recognized by a big player in the industry as a quality tool.
My only fear would be the direction the platform goes in. Many were unhappy about the Yahoo purchase of Flickr. Also, companies’ innovation can sometimes get slowed up while they are merging with a bigger organization. Regardless of those concerns, I’m excited about this change and look for good things to come from this partnership.
This excitement seems to be shared by our sales representative who sent us this:
We’re really excited because of the resources and commitment Yahoo brings to help Zimbra continue focusing on our key markets, including the Education sector. One of Yahoo’s key objectives in acquiring Zimbra is supporting and growing our presence in EDU, including on-premises deployments at colleges. Yahoo is a major proponent of open technologies and this will allow us to further grow the integration options and features of Zimbra, along with our partners in the EDU sector.
Tags: edu, education, email, merger, yahoo, zimbra
Zimbra
June 4, 2006 | 4 Comments
For a long time I’ve been touting Zimbra as the greatest available web-based mail client. I’ve never gotten around to mentioning it here, but I figure it’s time. In fact, Zimbra is more than just a web-based mail client, they call it a collaboration suite. Basically this means it has email, calendar, and contact management. It’s all Ajax based, open source, extendable, and provides a free version.
In addition to the fantastic interface, it is also a complete email server with industry level SPAM protection built-in. The email server supports IMAP and POP so users can continue using whatever desktop application they may prefer as an alternative to the web-based application.
With my general unhappiness with Outlook and most other web-based email solutions, I really wish I could use Zimbra. Go check out the hosted demo.
Tags: AJAX, collaboration, email, web 2.0, webmail, zimbra
Google Calendar Beta Available
April 13, 2006 | 1 Comment
I found out from Matt today that Google Calendar is now available! Matt has been waiting for this for awhile. If you have been too, go get your account, it’s easy and worth it.
The interface on this new product is great, very similar to GMail or any of the other Google services. However, I do have a couple complaints.
They did not implement any sort of desktop plugin for synchronization. I’ve been playing with Airset for a few months now, and it has this functionality. As a guy who needs to use our institutional Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server to interoperate with co-workers, Outlook is my glue, and desktop sync would make my life easier.
My other complaint is that there is basically no integration between Calendar and GMail. I want similar functionality to how Zimbra is able to detect dates inside emails you receive and allow right click capable add to calendar. If you haven’t seen this yet, go watch their demo, it’s slick.
OK, so these are frosting, but I expect perfection from Google! I’m sure these features and more will be slowly rolled into the product over time.
Tags: airset, calendar, gmail, google, google calendar, Sun Java Enterprise System Calendar Server, web 2.0, web20, zimbra