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Zimbra Blog
One of the great advantages of being an Open Source company is having a community and customer base that can help guide and shape the evolution of the product. Our community and customers use Zimbra in a wide variety of deployment scenarios from the single individual, to small and medium business, to hosted services and large Internet service providers. Such diversity naturally breeds some excellent ideas around product features and improvements. In many ways we think of our community and customers as product managers whose ideas and experiences can really help improve the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). In order to fully leverage such a wonderful resource, it is important to provide the right set of tools and process to easily enable communicating ideas and suggestions to us. It is equally important that folks can track the progress of their suggestions.
We have a product management process and website that we have been using internally for quite some time; today, we are making the process and a version of the website public. Let's first understand how enhancements make it into the ZCS.
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Posted by Ross on February 28, 2007 at 04:54 PM
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Last week I posted an entry comparing IE 7 with Firefox 1.5 and the venerable IE 6. Lot's of folks have since asked for Firefox 2 to be added to the mix. The reason we didn't initially include Firefox 2 is because it was not at the time officially released and so we felt it unfair for it to be included. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on October 25, 2006 at 01:33 PM
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Back in April I wrote an entry complaining about IE's performance as a Web 2.0 platform:
"From a Web 2.0 application developers perspective (developers who use a lot of JavaScript and DOM manipulation), IE 6 is plagued by a number of well known problems such as its ability to readily leak memory. Regrettably, Microsoft's next release of Internet Explorer, IE 7, does little to resolve these issues."
I am happy to say that I was wrong. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on October 19, 2006 at 10:13 AM
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Keyboard shortcuts and navigation are indispensable time savers for an application's frequent and power users. Who among us has not quickly learned the keyboard shortcuts for performing common tasks within an application that we use regularly?
Unfortunately, one of the more common complaints against web-based applications is that they are, in many instances, lacking when it comes to supporting keyboard shortcuts and navigation. Frankly, the lack of keyboard support (both shortcuts and navigation) is something that has annoyed me about the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), and it is something that I have been wanting to add to both Kabuki (the Zimbra Ajax Toolkit) and the ZCS; however, I didn't want to just stuff in some basic keyboard shortcuts and call it a day. Instead, I wanted to have a go at implementing the same level of keyboard support that most traditional UI toolkits and desktop applications support. This actually turned out to involve quite a bit of work - for example, since only input elements may have focus (in most browsers) we needed to simulate and track focus for toolkit components which frequently have no native input element associated with them - but at the end of the day, I think it was worth the effort. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on September 12, 2006 at 11:25 PM
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IE 6 is an inadequate platform for developing advanced Web 2.0 applications. I suspect that a number of hard core web application developers will nod their heads in agreement with this statement. From my experience, IE 6 is certainly more challenging to work with than some of its competitors, and it exhibits some very unpleasant behaviours that make it a difficult platform with which to develop advanced Web 2.0 applications.
Before I go further, I know some folks may be asking what exactly are “advanced Web 2.0 applications?” I describe them as the class of application making extensive use of AJAX and DHTML - which I like to, for convenience, group together under the AJAX umbrella - to provide a rich and compelling end user experience. Such applications can be easily identified by their ability to provide the flexibility, power, and richness of their desktop counterparts while at the same time bringing the power and benefits of the Web to the end user. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite’s web client as an example of such an application. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on April 17, 2006 at 12:37 AM
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Recently I had to write a document which required the inclusion of some images, a chart, and a few drawings in the text - something that modern word processors allow you to simply and readily do. In fact, the ability to embed and edit rich content directly in a document is actually a pretty handy and powerful feature; arguably one of the more important and enabling features of modern day office suites, such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.What is really nice is that the embedded content is saved along with the enclosing document. So for example, if I email a document to a colleague, then the embedded objects I have included into the document follow it to their destination. This embedding capability has traditionally been enabled by leveraging component object models such as Microsoft’s COM/DCOM or IBM’s DSOM and has been the domain of fat desktop applications and office suites.
Is it feasible to provide the same kind of embedding capabilities found in desktop applications in Ajax based applications? After some prototyping it is clear that it is possible. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on April 03, 2006 at 04:30 PM
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The term "mash-up" has been coined to describe the aggregation and customization of multiple web interfaces and web services to eliminate context-switching between existing systems, a process which delivers a richer experience and a wider range of capabilities to the end user. Technologies such as web services, AJAX, and REST have enabled developers to create new and interesting ways of providing some very cool integrations. We have demonstrated a number of these within the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), and have a guide in development which will enable the integration of third party information into the ZCS. We encourage you to download our specification and give us feedback and to help create compelling mash-ups. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on January 10, 2006 at 05:00 PM
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I get lots of questions about adding AjaxTk UI components (a.k.a. DWT components) to existing HTML content. This is actually fairly easy to do. You can find an example of how right here
Posted by Ross on December 17, 2005 at 01:24 AM
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The Zimbra Ajax web client is just one way to access the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). I have to admit that it is the one I almost always use, because I am totally hooked on the conversations, searching, and the calendar features. I basically never throw any email away anymore since finding stuff is such a breeze. I also like the fact that I can access the ZCS from anywhere on any machine that runs a supported browser. However, all of the capability that is provided in the client is for the most part realized by the server. In addition the server supports IMAP/POP clients, as well as iCAL clients. Another cool and important fact is that all the APIs that the client uses are public SOAP APIs that are documented in the source code download (look for soap.txt & soap-calendar.txt in the docs directory).
I would really love to see other folks write clients against the ZCS server. These could be full blown collaboration clients, utility clients such as Mac OS X or Konfabulator Widgets, or integrations with existing web clients (i.e. using the ZCS as a data source).
As an example, Greg (one of the engineers at Zimbra) has developed a mobile flash client that runs on a PocketPC. It supports such features as conversations and autocomplete on compose. It also syncs calendar appointments from the ZCS calendar. Greg runs it on his PocketPC mobile phone and uses it all the time - As do several other folks at Zimbra.
Posted by Ross on November 05, 2005 at 05:12 PM
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In 1999 when we were architecting and implementing Onebox.com, we had to select an implementation language. Given that all the principle architects at Onebox were from JavaSoft, so one would expect Java to be the natural choice. It was not.
Before going further, I should perhaps write a little about Onebox.com. Onebox.com was a unified messaging startup back in the Dot Com "gogo" days. The idea was to provide subscribers with a phone number and a web based "inbox" from whence they could get their email, voicemails, and faxes. So when a subscriber registered, they could pick a phone number in an area code, pick a user name and they were in business. The basic service was free, and the premium services (such as phone numbers without extensions, more disk, multiple phone numbers) were add on. The service did quite well and we were servicing over five million subscribers by the time we got acquired in 2000. Continue reading...
Posted by Ross on November 04, 2005 at 09:00 AM
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