The Challenge

Before using Zimbra, Logix had built its position as a leading hosted email service on a customized homegrown email solution. In recent years, as smartphone adoption grew exponentially in India, users demanded integration between smartphones with email. Logix realized this was an opportunity to grow its customer base.

The homegrown Logix solution, based only on POP and IMAP, was not capable of handling the market’s demands, however. Logix needed to deploy an email solution that provided true synchronization between a smartphone and the user’s mailbox, contacts and calendars – which the previous system could not do. The company needed a full communication platform that could offer mobile device integration, collaboration and all the latest features.

Logix customers also demanded Microsoft Outlook synchronization with email, calendars, contacts and  other data. Again, this was a capability not offered by the previous email solution.

In addition, Logix had to compete with Google and other Web-based email providers that offer substantial mailbox storage, so users can store multiple years of email data. Users were demanding email inboxes with as much as 25 GB of storage, which was impractical with the previous system.

The Solution

Logix deployed Zimbra as its primary email hosting platform. Now Logix offers Zimbra Collaboration Suite as a hosted service to all its customers across India. Logix migrated many of its existing customers to Zimbra, and in less than a year the company became the top Zimbra hosting provider in India. In addition, Logix is a Zimbra reseller that implements and manages Zimbra deployments for customers.

Logix offers three editions of Zimbra: Cloud Zimbra, a shared Zimbra hosting platform; Zimbra Virtual Private Server; and a Zimbra-Exchange hybrid platform.

Partner Benefits

Increased Revenue -

Due to the many attractive features of Zimbra designed to meet the market’s demands, Logix revenue has grown by 30 percent since the company started offering Zimbra. The presence that VMware has in the market, the awareness of the VMware brand, has also added to the commercial strength of the solution.

High Reliability and Availability -

“The downtime of Zimbra is much lower compared to our previous mailing solution,” explains Prashant Mudbidri, Director of Logix. “The reliability factor is much, much higher than the previous system. Uptime for Zimbra is 99.9 percent.”

Less Administration Time -

“Zimbra reduces our administration time,” says Mudbidri. “For example, it is very easy to migrate a set of users from one server to another server, without impacting the user. This was quite cumbersome when we were on the previous platform. In the previous mailing system, we were spending days to accomplish these tasks. With Zimbra we spend less than an hour. Zimbra has reduced our administration cost drastically.”

As another example, the Logix IT team saves time with backup as well. The backup cycle used to take more than three days to complete, with the previous mail system. With Zimbra, a full backup takes twelve hours, and the incremental backup takes less than two hours.

Eliminated Need for In-House Development

One of the most important advantages of Zimbra is that it enabled Logix to deploy the platform quickly, rather than expend the time and expense of developing a new email system in-house.

“Zimbra offers a great set of functionality which we did not want to have to develop ourselves,” Mudbidri points out. “We could have developed an email solution in-house but it would have taken a long time – up to a year and a half to develop and implement – which means we would have brought the solution to market quite late.”

“If we had developed our own solution in-house, we would not have been able to address key requirements like mobility and Microsoft Outlook synchronization,” he adds. “We would not have been able to achieve the functionality that were the key drivers for changing the email solution in the first place.”

Fast Provisioning and Commissioning -

Zimbra adoption, implementation and migration was seamless, according to Mudbidri. Now Logix takes just 24 hours to onboard any customer.

Continuous Improvement -

“Since VMware acquired Zimbra, they have added many excellent improvements to the solution,” says Mudbidri. “In the roadmap, VMware continues to look forward in terms of integrating with unified communications and adding more valuable features to Zimbra.”

Customer Benefits

Ease of Use -

Zimbra offers an easy-to-use Webmail front-end to Logix customers, with convenient drag-and-drop functionality.

Webmail Flexibility -

“When customers migrate to Zimbra, we see an increase in Webmail usage, which makes data management much easier, because the mail client is not residing on the user’s laptop or desktop,” Mudbidri explains. “Users like Zimbra Webmail because it is easy to use and intuitive, they can use their choice of browser, and they can enjoy all the same benefits as a mail client.”

Improved Collaboration -

One of the greatest advantages of Zimbra, for Logix customers, is having a mailbox that is very feature rich, says Mudbidri. Zimbra offers extensive collaboration functionality, including Zimbra Briefcase, shared contacts and shared calendars.

Productive Mobility -

“Smartphone synchronization is a key advantage Zimbra provides our customers,” Mudbidri confirms. “With Zimbra, they can synchronize their entire mailbox, contacts and calendars with their smartphone, iPad or tablet. This enhances customer productivity to a great extent.”

Backup and Restore -

“Backup and restore is one key feature that other mailing systems, especially Cloud-based solutions  like Google, fail to deliver,” Mudbidri notes. “Backup and restore is something that our customers see as a key feature, a value-added advantage from Zimbra that they do not get with other cloud mailing solutions.”

Built-In Archiving -

“Archiving has become a top need for the customers, a must-have feature,” says Mudbidri, “and archiving is built into Zimbra. This is something every customer is looking at, and they do not want to do it in-house.”

With Zimbra Archiving, there is no need to maintain a large mailbox. A copy of every email is stored in the archive, which can be easily retrieved by admins and users as needed.

Enhanced Security -

The way Zimbra stores data, and the way users access the system, is far more secure than other email options, according to Mudbidri. Logix utilizes Zimbra to ensure customer emails and data are tamper-proof,  and cannot be seen or copied by anyone, including administrators managing the servers.

Business Control -

Zimbra enables Logix customers to enforce many business control policies such as Mail Sending/Receiving, Access Control, Attachment Size/Type/Mail Content on to Users/Group/Domain.

The post Logix Boosts Revenue by 30 Percent with Zimbra appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Osterman Research recently published a survey of corporate email users on their use of email. The results show that email is still a critical part of the work environment for many people.

We’re not cutting back on email at work
Despite social media channels and other means of communications, we still rely on email at work.  90 percent of the survey respondents use email as much or more today than a year ago:

Source: Osterman Research, “Results of a Survey with Email Users,” April 2013

Businesses may be embracing Twitter, LinkedIn and Salesforce Chatter, but they still rely on email to get things done.

We spend a lot of time in the email application
According to the study, the average user spends nearly two and a half hours a day actively working with email.

This research highlights the link between email and productivity.  Any place you spend hours each day is the first place to look for productivity gains and efficiencies.

Fine-tuning email for productivity
Zimbra has evolved over the years to fit more easily into your work life. Its basic design, with integrated functions for scheduling meetings, sharing files and maintaining contact information, means that you spend less time switching between applications.  With your Zimbra ‘personal cloud,’ you don’t have to spend time moving data when you switch between devices. And having a common web-based interface keeps you productive when you move from tablet to desktop to phone.

If you really want to reclaim some time, use Zimlets to embed functions from other applications in the Zimbra deployment. Many Zimbra customers integrate CRM, mapping and other application Zimlets in Zimbra to create productive “mash-up” environments for their employees.

Zimbra 8 introduced several features designed to save time and improve productivity:

• Unified Communications support in Zimbra 8 makes it easier to switch between communication channels with one-click dialing or fast instant messaging in response to an email. See the blog entry on Unified Communications.
• Zimbra 8 includes numerous enhancements for handling the growing volume of email, including conversations and activity streams. (See the blog posting Making Sense of Email Overload with Zimbra 8 or learn more about Zimbra 8 here)

You can download the survey report from the Osterman Research site.
http://www.ostermanresearch.com/freeresearch/download180.htm

The post New Research Shows Email’s Growing Business Role appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Today, Zimbra Desktop is the way to use Zimbra when offline – and it’s done a good job at providing consistency between the online and offline experience. But we think we can deliver a faster, smoother and more efficient offline experience by re-architecting Zimbra Desktop from the ground up.

This change describes the work that we are doing for supporting the offline experience – to be available in a future version of Zimbra.

On a side note: Nothing discussed here affects third-party client support – such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book and standards-based clients (POP, IMAP, iCal, CalDAV, etc.)

Background
The concept behind the Zimbra Desktop was to create a consistent experience whether you’re offline or online.  The look and feel should be the same.  This is in contrast to environments where the browser-based interface is really different than the local email client – say, using Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web Access.

In the current Zimbra Desktop, we’ve done this by building the entire stack on the desktop  – web server, application code, database capabilities.

The technologies available have evolved. For example:

The client devices have changed and expanded to include a growing number of mobile phones and tablets. Native client frameworks can do functions such as storing, synching and accessing local data very efficiently.

• Although still under development, HTML5 is maturing and offers a new set of offline capabilities. It will eventually subsume earlier versions of HTML.

So our team started evaluating ways to use these technologies to make the Zimbra Desktop better – without re-engineering core capabilities already available elsewhere.

The New Zimbra Offline Architecture
We’re excited about the possibilities of using HTML5 to support a seamless, browser-based offline experience. But we’re also looking at ways that the native client platforms can supplement the browser environment, for example:

• Notifying you of new email or appointments when the browser isn’t open
• Storing and indexing data for local search and access
• Synchronizing data with the Zimbra server

We’re moving towards a hybrid architecture that will combine the best of both worlds  – browser-based simplicity with native capabilities for functions such as notifications, storage and indexing.

The team is still sorting out several key design issues, such as: how will we handle viewing attachments when offline? How much storage is the right amount? How do we figure which emails and attachments to store locally? Most importantly, which features do we need?

End user requirements: consistency
The most important requirement is to deliver a consistent experience, whether you’re online or offline.  Clearly, the offline environment cannot support everything you have online – the amount of data needed would be prohibitive. And we need to balance functionality with performance.

Consider a case:  you’re commuting on a train and the WiFi connection cuts in and out while you’re working. Our objective is that the transition should be seamless. At a minimum, offline capabilities should include:

• Reading emails and working with your calendar
• Viewing attachments
• Composing emails (with autocomplete for addressing them)
• Automatic synchronization when you reconnect

Administrative requirements: security and control
For administrators, the offline experience brings the challenge of data residing on devices outside of their control.  So we’re thinking hard about their requirements for the offline experience as well, which may include:

• Remote wipe
• Policy-based controls on attachments
• Data retention policies applies to data on the remote devices

Your thoughts?
In a future version of Zimbra, we’ll switch from the current Zimbra Desktop to the new offline experience.  Look for more information as we come closer to future Zimbra releases. In the meantime, we’d welcome your feedback in comments here.  Please provide comments here, on our Twitter feed, Facebook page or start a thread in our Zimbra forums.

The post The Future of the Zimbra Offline Experience appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Here’s what we’re working on.

HTML5 Offline Web App

With our mission to drive advancements in Zimbra into the browser as our primary client experience, so goes Zimbra Desktop. ZD was essentially an offline HTML experience using SQL lite to store data, Jetty to serve our web app locally, and Prism (Firefox) to render the client UI. HTML5 enables us to cache our web app in local storage and provide SQL services, via IndexedDB embedded within Chrome, IE, and FireFox, to store and retrieve a local cache of your mailbox data.

Initially we will support mail, calendar, and contacts and we’re taking the approach of syncing your current working set of data up to 30 days similar to a mobile experience where you typically don’t sync your entire 30GB mailbox. For those that must have their entire 30GB mailbox locally with them at all times, we are continuing to make advancements in the sync protocols and Desktop clients we support…keep reading.

HTML5 Touch Web App

We are completely rewriting our mobile web app using the Sencha Touch Mobile HTML5 Framework optimized for the canvas size of today’s smartphones and tablet devices. Our design goals are to focus on fast triage and quick replies to email messages using touch and swipe gestures while providing a unique Zimbra experience with our tags, flags, and search. Initially we are focused on mail, calendar, and contacts with extensibility in mind.  Skinning and theming can be done through standard CSS and the Sencha Touch framework has a broad community of contributors and documentation for those interested in doing more layout changes or building additional capabilities on top of our core solution.

Here’s a screenshot of the Alpha UI:

Exchange Web Services

For those that want a native client experience, we aim to support these types of clients using sync protocols. Just as we support native clients across a wide range of platforms and devices using IMAP/POP, CalDAV, CardDAV, and ActiveSync; we will introduce Exchange Web Services (EWS) support. EWS will allow us to support the latest versions of Outlook on Windows and MAC and even the native Apple Desktop Clients. One of the added benefits to supporting EWS is that there is no need to deploy a client connector (eg Zimbra Connector for Outlook) on the local desktop. EWS is a server side protocol and will make it easier for administrators to support the leading desktop clients without desktop touches. You will still be able to connect the Apple Desktop clients via IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV as we are committed to supporting standards based protocols.

Always ON, Carrier Grade Architecture

We’re making several architectural changes to Zimbra’s backend to enhance availability, scalability, patching, and update/upgrades. Zimbra has three major components that represent the mailbox configuration and message data: our LDAP Directory, message blobs, and message metadata. In Zimbra 8, we introduced multi-master replication for our LDAP Directory that enabled rolling upgrades and maintenance of this component without service disruption. We also introduced a new version of our StoreManager API that integrates with cloud storage technologies like Scality and EMC Atmos to provide distributed and highly available stores for our message blobs. In JudasPriest, we will introduce a distributed, shared nothing, and active-active architecture for our message metadata and a separate web app component that can be installed on it’s own server. We already have a working prototype of this architecture in our lab.

Yesterday the Engineering team showed me a demo of multiple mailbox servers with multiple web clients attached to the same mailbox at the same time on different servers. Then one of our server engineers opens Apple Mail connected to the mailbox via IMAP and starts flagging messages. You can see the flags show up across both web clients connected to different servers! This is a truly active-active architecture that not only provides redundancy/failover but load balancing for mailboxes across a pool over servers.

This architecture serves as the foundation to provide rolling upgrades with 0 downtime! Mailbox service nodes can be upgraded with maintenance releases or eventually major versions without end user disruption with control over when a user is cut over to the new version and UI.

I’ll continue to provide more information regarding JudasPriest in upcoming posts.

Cheers,

The Zimbra Team

The post Zimbra (JudasPriest) Release Update 1 appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Watch the on demand webinar as we discuss how Zimbra is uniquely built for the highest security environments and is ideal for government organizations with our special guest from General Dynamics IT. VMware Zimbra supports two-way SSL Smartcard authentication, including support for Department of Defense (DoD), Common Access Cards (CAC), and S/MIME encryption, ensuring messages can only be read by the intended recipient. IT admins also have full control of their deployments through an easy-to-use browser-based admin console, further ensuring data and device security.

The on demand 45-minute webinar will include:

• Challenges and requirements of the Government Sector
• Special guest GDIT on why the Zimbra Cloud is ideal for Government Organizations
• A live demo of Zimbra’s email and collaboration solution

View Webinar Now

The post Delivering Government Cloud Email Services appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Communication between the school’s 63 faculty and staff members, as well as with students – enabled by Zimbra – proves to be a key capability for the school’s normal daily operation, as well as during one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit Japan.

The Challenge

Prior to Zimbra, DSTY used another Windows-based e-mail system, which provided messaging ability, and some basic calendar functionality, but it did not have any sharing capability between the two, and did not offer a shared repository for data such as Zimbra Briefcase.

“One of the challenges we had was sharing calendars for booking rooms, and finding out when people are available,” recalls John Munro, IT Administrator at DSTY. “We set up a shared calendar resource through Microsoft Outlook with a third-party solution. It was not built into the messaging, and required manual installation on each client and a lot of attention.”

“The system was not reliable, and was not always available” he adds. “Sometimes it would stop working and we had to restart the service. Scheduling in a school environment presents significant challenges because everyone has such a variety of schedules. We have conferences and meetings all the time, and we need a reliable system for scheduling.”

DSTY also had issues with system access. The previous communication system was only available within the local network, and only via a dedicated connection to Outlook, so it was only available on certain user’s computers. The school could not function with such limited access and unreliable performance. That is when DSTY turned to Zimbra.

The Solution

DSTY evaluated several alternatives, including Microsoft Exchange, and Zimbra came out on top, due to significantly lower cost and less ongoing maintenance. Today the school uses Zimbra for all email and calendaring. DSTY has an internal calendar for faculty and staff, and a separate public calendar that students and visitors can access via the school website.

“Zimbra offers a lot of functionality with a simple interface,” Munro notes. “For example, we can search for an email and can get an answer in seconds, versus the previous system that would take several minutes to do a search. The usability is so great within Zimbra.”

“From a long-term perspective, we have the confidence that Zimbra is going to keep improving, and give us more capabilities,” he continues. “This means we have a communication system that is future proof. We do not have to worry whether we are going to keep using this product, or if it is going to keep meeting our needs. We can see online what will be in the next version, and that gives us confidence in the future.”

Deployment Overview

Deployment was very smooth and painless,” Munro says. “Setting up the system and getting it running, has always been reliable.”

“The migration from our previous system to Zimbra was quite seamless, due to the migration tools  Zimbra offers,” he adds. “Our email accounts and address books were transferred over without any loss of data.”

Business Results & Benefits

Improved Communication -

“Prior to using Zimbra, 50% of the teaching staff would never check their emails,” Munro remembers.  “Now 100% of our staff check their emails every day. I attribute that increase in usage to how much easier Zimbra is to use.”

High Reliability -

“People need to know that a communication system is always going to be there for them to use,” Munro says. “Zimbra has given us that reliability. Whether people are accessing it from inside the school, at home or overseas, they are experiencing a seamless environment. Our previous communication system was only available on certain user’s computers, whereas Zimbra is available everywhere.”

Greater Mobility -

Teachers and staff at the school are utilizing mobile devices regularly. Zimbra integrates well with the cutting edge devices, such as iPhone and iPad, enabling the DSTY team a level of mobility they could not achieve before.

Increased Staff Productivity -

DSTY staff and faculty depend on Zimbra for a variety of tasks that help improve productivity. Easy-to-use calendaring integrated with email streamlines the complex process of setting up meetings, and Zimbra notifications keep everyone apprised of the schedules. On the old system people had to log into the calendar every time to figure out what was going on.

“Zimbra takes care of the little things we don’t want to have to think about every day, and it enables us to think about the bigger issues,” Munro confirms. “A lot of unnecessary communication is skipped. We can just do what we need to do.”

Less IT Administration Time and Effort

“I am the school’s only full-time IT Technician, and there are many priorities,” Munro points out. “With Zimbra, not having to spend time maintaining such an important part of our communications system means that I can really focus on things that matter. The Zimbra environment and the admin interface is very user-friendly, simple and quick to use.”

“Zimbra allows us to do so much more through our communication system,” Munro continues. “Zimbra gives us about five times more benefit to the users with zero increase in the amount of administration time.”

Business Continuity During Disaster

On March 11, 2011, Japan was hit by a 8.9-magnitude earthquake, which also set off a devastating tsunami. Many DSTY teachers, staff members and students left the country, and were dispersed around the world. About a week after the disaster, the faculty was able to leverage Zimbra Briefcase to resume classwork, even though the school was closed for almost two months. A share folder was created for each class, accessible by students who could receive their assignments and email work back to the teachers. In this way, the school was able to maintain continuity during one of the worst natural disasters in Japan’s history.

“The fact that we had this central system enabled us to quickly respond to an unexpected situation,” Munro explains. “Our school received an excellence award from the German government for our response to the disaster, and Zimbra was one of the main software components that enabled us to respond so effectively. We are prepared for any future disaster, and Zimbra is an essential factor. “

Easy Virtualization

The school’s Zimbra server has been virtualized on a VMware ESXi 5 server, and now DSTY can maintain full messaging and Internet capability for up to five hours without power, compared to 15 minutes previously.

“Zimbra was virtualized quite smoothly,” Munro notes. “Zimbra’s internal structure makes that change seamless. The ability to have Zimbra running smoothly in a virtual environment means we have protection for server failure, and we have a reliable off-site backup solution. In addition, the integration between Zimbra and VMware vSphere has enabled us, through HSM, to increase data storage for users about five times what we had previously, with the potential to increase about 20 times.”

The post Deutsche Schule Tokyo Yokohama Keeps Faculty, Staff and Students Connected with Zimbra appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

The Challenge

As a hosting provider, XMission started out offering email-only solutions to customers. The company soon realized this was not sufficient. XMission’s email customers were managing third-party applications for contacts, and maintaining separate calendaring applications, and they had to support each of these applications themselves. XMission saw those customers really needed a whole communications suite, rather than having to maintain multiple, siloed tools.

“We try to be proactive on the services that we offer, and we realized email alone is simply not enough,” explains John Webster, XMission VP of Business Development and Zimbra Product Manager. “We saw an increased demand for business continuity and ease of use. We wanted a solution – with email, calendar and contacts all together – that eliminated the need for customers to maintain silos for their applications.”

“The challenge is trying to find a solution that makes sense to the end-user,” he adds. “They want something that just works, and they want a lot of the features. They want email, calendar, tasks, file transfer options, address book – Zimbra provides all of that.”

The Solution

XMission partners with Zimbra and offers the full Zimbra Collaboration Suite to its premier customers as part of its Unified Email & Collaboration product.

“Zimbra was a good move for us, and a substantial benefit for our customer base,” Webster confirms. “Zimbra’s email, shared address book, and shared calendar – those three together are a powerhouse. Zimbra eliminated a lot of the barriers that our customers were experiencing.”

“At XMission, we considered a number of alternatives,” Webster clarifies, “and we continue to look around in the market to make sure that Zimbra is the best fit for us, and it absolutely continues to be the best. We are very pleased with VMware Zimbra.”

Partner Benefits

As a VMware partner, XMission gains the following benefits by offering Zimbra:

Increased Revenue -

“Zimbra offers a lot of revenue opportunity for us,” Webster says. “Zimbra is one of our most profitable products, because of the lower price point.”

“For hosting service providers, Zimbra is a very lucrative product. It is reliable, it is easy-to-use and administrate, and it makes you money,” he adds. “Zimbra is a great value add for us, and it gives us upsell opportunities down the road as well.”

Because Zimbra is viewed in the market as a viable Exchange replacement – at a price point that is lower than Exchange, but with even more features  – it also helps attract more customers and generate more revenue.

Market Credibility -

“Zimbra offers us credibility, especially since the acquisition by VMware,” Webster states. “VMware is extremely committed to consistent upgrades and improvements to the product, which shows that Zimbra will be viable for years. That is a great benefit to existing customers, and a significant advantage in the sales process, when we are trying to acquire new customers for XMission Unified Email & Collaboration.”

Lower Cost -

Webster advises that Zimbra is very reasonably priced – a fraction of the cost of Microsoft exchange. In addition, XMission saves on hardware costs because Zimbra is able to run on Linux, enabling XMission to choose the hardware.

Streamlined Deployment -

“The time to implement Zimbra is very fast,” says Webster. “Migrating customers through the onboarding process is really quick and easy. It doesn’t require a lot of staff time. We can have users up and running in just a few minutes.”

Easy Tech Support -

“When you are an administrator, supporting many users, you want a partner you can trust,” Webster explains. “At XMission that is what we provide – we are a partner you can trust. And that is why we use Zimbra, because we believe in Zimbra, and we can support it very well.”

“Supporting Zimbra has been effortless because it is easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to configure,” he continues. “We very seldom have to get VMware involved, but when we do, the VMware Zimbra support team available to us, as a hosting service provider, is fantastic. They are very responsive. When there is a support concern, VMware addresses it very quickly.”

Reliability and Availability -

XMission offers customers 100% availability on their email service, backed by Zimbra’s world-class reliability.

“High availability is absolutely critical,” Webster says. “Zimbra has been such a reliable product that we never have concerns. Zimbra always works.”

Strong Partner Support -

Webster is impressed by VMware’s strong partner support, which includes regular partner updates, extensive forums, and previews of new features.

Customer Benefits

XMission’s customers gain the following benefits from Zimbra:

Premium User Experience -

Zimbra’s web interface is a premium user experience, when compared to the Exchange web experience, according to Webster. Zimbra offers a unified feature-rich user experience that can be accessed via  desktop or the web.

Ease of Use -

“Zimbra’s ease of use is a big advantage for our customers,” Webster verifies. “They can plug Zimbra into any third-party applications – Outlook, iCal, a tablet or Android – and it just works. In the past the onboarding process for new technologies was a barrier. Zimbra eliminates that barrier.”

In terms of easy-to-use features, Webster cites a range of keyboard shortcuts, the ability to drag and drop an email onto the calendar, and dropping files into Zimbra Briefcase for sharing, as just a few examples.

“There is so much available power in Zimbra,” he continues. “Zimbra suits everybody, from an email-only user to a power user who uses every feature. Zimbra offers something for everyone.”

Increased Productivity -

“The strongest story I have for end-user productivity is my own,” Webster offers. “When we started using Zimbra I literally increased my efficiency by 30%. Suddenly I didn’t have all the silos. I didn’t have any barriers to getting my work done. I can manage my contacts more efficiently. I have a calendar always available. The web interface makes it super easy to use – no matter where I am I can open up a web browser and access my data.”

“I use all the features extensively on Zimbra. I love the product. Zimbra works for me and my team, and saves time and money. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“Our customers have the same potential to increase their productivity,” he adds. “If they are using multiple separate applications for calendar, contacts, tasks and file management, or if they are coming from a legacy or limited email system, they could easily increase productivity by 30%.”

Security and Data Protection -

The Zimbra Briefcase provides security, control and continuity that public sharing applications like Dropbox simply cannot offer.

Greater Mobility -

Mobility is a major advantage of Zimbra, and a critical benefit of XMission’s product offering. Zimbra offers seamless interoperability with all major smartphones on the market.

“One of the strongest tools I have in sales presentations is to enter a contact on my smartphone, and then access my contacts and show what I just entered on my phone is now on a centralized server and available on my desktop,” says Webster. “Zimbra’s real-time functionality is very impressive to prospective customers.”

Eliminates Need for Third-Party Apps -

Zimbra’s wide ranging features, all in one solution offered by XMission, eliminates the licensing expenses of Outlook, as well as the costs associated with a variety of other third-party applications.

The post XMission Meets Market Demand and Generates More Revenue with Zimbra appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

This year’s summit was our largest one ever and included 61 attendees from 14 different carriers and partners from around the Globe.  Our partners heard from the Zimbra leadership on their plans around evolving Zimbra to support their “always on” environments in a non-disruptive manner, as well as providing an optimized messaging experience for mobile devices, tablets, PCs and the Web.

Zimbra’s culture is rooted in openness and transparency – from our Open Source Edition of Zimbra, to our public forums with over 50,000 Members and finally to our strong Developer Community that has contributed hundreds of extensions to our Zimlet gallery. We believe this transparency and openness benefits each of our carrier partners and their email and collaboration offerings. Their real-world learnings greatly contribute to the quality of our product and our continued partnership will continue to make the Zimbra product better.  Whether you are a mobile carrier in Japan or the biggest cable operator in the US, operating a messaging platform used by millions of subscribers in a 24×7 environment while continuing to innovate and delight subscribers with the best in class messaging experience is critical to success.

We are thankful to have such a strong community of carriers who are each leading the industry in offering innovative messaging services based on VMware Zimbra and we look forward to seeing this community continue to grow in the future.

The post Zimbra’s Service Provider Ecosystem Continues to Grow appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

Zimbra:  For us, it’s all about tying those tools into our user experience so users can seamlessly  “right click” and go into a voice or video call.  The goal is to be able to escalate from working asynchronously with someone via email to working with that person via voice and video in real time.  From our perspective, a lot of task and action items that people do on a daily basis start in email, but they don’t necessarily end in email.  They either require that someone have a meeting or pick up the phone. To be able to seamlessly start  a HD Vidyo call right from your email or calendar, seems like a natural progression.

Vidyo: Most people these days work in a “bring your own device” environment and have a distributed work force; even a lot of contractors.  At the end of the day, what you have is people working in a lot of diverse environments communicating with a variety of different devices and networks.  When you think that these people need to be productive and get things done efficiently to move forward on projects and tasks, what it comes down to is the ability to communicate effectively.  And it’s been demonstrated many times that the most effect means of communicating is face-to-face; to be able to people’s reactions and expressions. Visual communications conveys so much more information than a written or voice-only exchange – especially when you’re in that kind of distributed work environment.

Zimbra:  Exactly.  From our perspective, a lot of task and action items that people do on a daily basis start in email, but they don’t necessarily end in email.  They either require that someone have an in-person meeting or pick up the phone. You need to go from asynchronous email to making decisions in real time with people. Zimbra wants to  bring the right communication tools, specifically reliable real-time communication tools, into our experience and create options for escalations and work-flows that the end user can have right at their fingertips to collaboratively move forward, be productive, get things done, close off action items, complete tasks, work on projects together, and collaborate more effectively.  Vidyo’s is ideally suited to work with Zimbra, because, unlike other video conferencing technologies, it can be easily integrated with our virtual platform, plus delivers excellent visual and audio communications quality over the widest range of devices and networks.

Vidyo:  Vidyo is seeing an explosion of web applications, such as Zimbra, that offer features and usability directly from a browser.  As more and more applications move towards becoming web applications, the need for native collaboration grows.  Embedding video conferencing directly into the application’s browser interface is the next evolution in collaboration.  As such, Vidyo is moving towards providing the same level of quality and usability customers are used to inside the browser and/or downloadable clients for various desktop and mobile form factors.

Zimbra:  When that happens, we are completely on board.  We ultimately want to be able to deliver a web app through the browser and not have to worry about what’s happening on the actual device at the operating system level – just having to think about the browser and what the browser is capable of.  What Zimbra offers today is simple and instantly upgradeable.

The post A Conversation with Vidyo and Zimbra: A Match Made in Virtual Heaven appeared first on Zimbra :: Blog.

The interest in cloud email was high, but with Exchange they quickly ran into stability, scalability and cost issues that threatened their growing business. Because they provided hosted Exchange to their customers and used it internally, AINEO’s team quickly became familiar with the limitations of Exchange from a technical and usability standpoint and it was clear this approach was holding them back.

As a partner selling and servicing both Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange, AINEO was at a difficult crossroads between which platform would support their aggressive growth plans for hosted email. They had to decide whether or not to push through the expensive pains of Microsoft Exchange, or decide to go with another solution such as Zimbra. Through thorough analysis they finally reached an internal agreement that it was time to put Microsoft Exchange behind them – both internally and for their customers – and find a solution that was built for the post-PC era.

The Challenge: Preparing for the Next 10 Years of Growth

To make the selection about which platform would better support the future of email AINEO looked no further than their own usage of Exchange and a realization that Microsoft Exchange wasn’t meeting their needs for accessibility, collaboration and stability. The only way that AINEO could prepare themselves for the next wave of company growth was to make sure they had infrastructure in place that they could rely on. AINEO was trying to deal with the challenges of a remote, collaborative workforce that is becoming increasingly common for companies around the world.

With clients around the world AINEO found a good portion of their team traveling a majority of the time. This meant AINEO’s employees had to be able to access their email and calendars from any computer at any time. This was simply not possible with Microsoft Exchange. A hardware agnostic email system would be ideal for AINEO and their employees.

The second hurdle was around collaboration features. With part of their employee base on the road they had to find a way for their workforce to collaborate. One of the key collaboration challenges they needed to address was around calendaring. Setting calendars in Outlook was difficult and clunky. Microsoft did not offer a full view of multiple employees’ schedule that allowed people to easily set up meetings with no errors. AINEO knew there had to be better collaboration tools out there.

Finally, Microsoft Exchange was a huge demand on server processing power and memory, which led to instability and a need for more – expensive – computing power. This instability caused obvious scalability issues for AINEO. Every time they added a new client’s hosted exchange to their servers they found themselves holding their breath hoping nothing broke internally or externally. Initially AINEO looked to add additional resources to improve Exchange performs, but with an investment of $220,000 into servers solely for Microsoft Exchange, AINEO needed to find a cheaper and more stable platform to take their hosted email business forward.

The Solution: Global Scalability

After thoroughly evaluating multiple email providers with the needs of their employees and customers in mind, they knew Zimbra was the answer. As an email service built for the post-PC era Zimbra gave AINEO everything they were looking for. This included Zimbra’s Ajax web interface with features like drag and drop appointment scheduling that makes it easy for employees to get work done no matter where they are or what device they’re using. Zimbra’s collaboration features around content sharing and calendaring blew Microsoft out of the water and showcased how there’s more to an email system than just remote access and calendaring.

Once the internal evaluation proved out, the business side took a look at the cost of purchasing, running and supporting Microsoft Exchange was driving profits out the door. Zimbra offered AINEO a more stable platform that was easy to administrate for a fraction of the cost. That paired with the robust Ajax web interface and unique collaboration features made Zimbra an obvious choice.

The web interface and collaboration features were fantastic, however, AINEO still had some push back from loyal Microsoft Exchange employees. Thankfully Zimbra had AINEO covered. With Zimbra being interoperable, AINEO was able to set up Outlook interfaces while running Zimbra on the back end. This ensured that everyone, even the loyal Microsoft fans, didn’t lose productivity during the transition over to Zimbra. Not only was productively not lost during the transition but server stability the users were put on a much more stable system. With Zimbra taking far less processing power and memory than Microsoft Exchange it was a win win for everyone. They finally had an email, calendaring and collaboration platform that was built for their need.

Business Results/ Benefits:

AINEO Networks has been running Zimbra since 2008 and they could not be happier. They run it internally for their team, and hosted as a service at www.QuickerWeb.com.  Their thorough evaluation of all the options paid off, they finally had an email system that didn’t drain their resources. After purchasing Zimbra they were able to migrate their entire workforce over to Zimbra overnight. This was huge for AINEO, especially after having gone through the setup process of Microsoft Exchange. Running on Zimbra ANIEO is now poised for the next phase of company growth.

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