With functionality reaching far beyond that of traditional webmail, Zimbra is working to redefine browser-based messaging.

by Jeff Goldman [May 17, 2006]

Zimbra was founded in late 2003 by a group of people from the messaging solutions team at Openwave, with the aim of developing a more advanced messaging system. "What we believed was that the existing messaging infrastructures that were out there had been developed at a time—15 years ago—when we didn't know all of the things that people would need to do today with messaging," says Andy Pflaum, Zimbra's Vice President of Business Development.

After two years in development, the company launched the resulting product, the Zimbra Collaborative Suite, just a few months ago. The solution makes use of a number of open source components, including the Linux filesystem, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and Apache Tomcat.

The company has open sourced its solution on the server side using the Mozilla Public License, and on the client side using the Zimbra Public License—the key difference being that the open source version of the client requires that the Zimbra brand remain visible.

Still, it's not only open source—the product is also available in a non-open-source Network Edition, which adds a wide range of functionality, from Outlook connectivity to 24/7 technical support, as well as full branding. ISPs can then license the software to host on their own servers and resell to their users.

Pricing depends on the level of functionality: for ISP resellers, Pflaum says, the wholesale price of the full business edition is $1.75 per user per month, while the consumer package costs just a few dollars per user per year.

Innovative functionality
While Zimbra's messaging server works with traditional desktop clients like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, it's in the product's browser-based Ajax interface that most of the solution's real strengths lie.

The interface's strengths start, Pflaum says, with the fully indexed message store, which makes it easy to search vast quantities of e-mail. Users can search by a variety of criteria, looking within e-mail headers, bodies and attachments. "Because of the indexing, we can give the user a very granular way of diving down and finding things in their mailbox, which makes it very handy in a day when users are getting provisioned 2 GB mailboxes, but it's not necessarily easy, once you've got 2 GB of mail, to find anything in there," he says.

The indexing also enables Zimbra's most innovative feature, the Zimlet, which ties data from e-mails to outside websites or applications—for example, scrolling over an address in an e-mail automatically pops up a Yahoo! Map of that location, and scrolling over a date in an e-mail pops up a view of your calendar for that day.

"We've published a spec for these Zimlets, and it's open source—so third parties, whether that's the service provider or another integrator that they might work with, can create Zimlets to connect between a messaging application and other data sources from the internet, or other applications," Pflaum says.

Zimlets also work in reverse. At the side of the web interface sits a list of available Zimlets—dragging anything onto an item in that list pops up the relevant information.

"If I've got a contact card for somebody, and I drag him on top of the Maps Zimlet, that'll go out to Yahoo! and spawn me a map for his location," Pflaum says. "Or if I drag him onto the Salesforce.com Zimlet, it'll log me onto Salesforce, pull his information, and drop that into our Salesforce.com account."

The calendar functionality is equally powerful. For business customers, calendars can be shared between users, allowing them to view each other's free/busy information—and one user can also drag his or her calendar on top of another's calendar in order to quickly assess available time slots. The same is true for residential customers—if an ISP wants to publish a TV schedule, or a schedule for a local sports team, users can then access that information with the same click-and-drag functionality.

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