Zimbra, the open source email provider that has drawn attention for its Ajax front end and relational database back end, is finally releasing the first production version of its product, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. The suite, which is versioned 3.0 (versions 1 and 2 were alpha and public beta, or community preview versions), adds some new bells and whistles. Specifically, it expands search capabilities from clients to administrators. Admins can now search across mailboxes. Additionally, new tools for automating the migration of IMAP and Exchange servers have also been introduced.
The suite includes a back end that uses the MySQL database for storing metadata, the Linux file system for storing messages, and rich Ajax clients that provide the ability to combine email messaging with the web.
These announcements come on the heels of last week's beta release of Zimlets, an XML-based toolkit and set of APIs that are simpler alternatives to developing web services calls (Zimbra already supports generation of SOAP messages). With Zimlets, developers can write “mashups” that blend Zimbra mail messages with other end user applications. Specifically, you write declarative XML statements to get data from a Zimbra email message, with the goal of extracting information from an external source. The resulting information is transformed by XSLT (an XML standard) to the desired presentation format.
Aimed at web developers, Zimlets do not require knowledge of Ajax, the rich client framework used by Zimbra. However, for more advanced developers, you could link the XML statements to Java Server Pages (JSPs) to take advantage of the power of Java. “Before this, you would have had to know our source code,” said president and CEO Satish Dharmaraj.
As Zimbra is now formally releasing production product, it claims to be servings hundreds of thousands of email clients. Zimbra’s has previously announced that H&R Block, the U.S. tax preparation firm, has already committed to rollout to 10,000 offices. CTO Scott Dietzen claims that hundreds of thousands of email seats are in the pipeline for next quarter.
The open source edition is free, and the commercially supported Network Edition is available now for $28/mailbox/year.
