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Zimbra Blog
In the Zimbra blog, we tend to focus on innovation within the Zimbra software, but the Zimbra team is also always striving to improve the process through which our technology is developed and delivered. We have arrived at our current model over three years of noodling and experimentation. Think of it as a best-of-breed blend of proven approaches from open source with innovations in Software as a Service (SaaS), software appliances, and Web 2.0. We summarize some of those key insights below ...
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Posted by Scott on May 21, 2007 at 06:13 AM
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Last week IBM hosted an exploratory summit on mashups, modeled (I think) on our early brainstorming sessions that lead to the formation of the OpenAjax Alliance. Zimbra was thrilled to get the opportunity to join in and share some of our lessons learned in Ajax “mashing” the past couple of years. (As usual in these circumstances, I believe that any thoughts voiced by others are out of bounds for blogging, but feel no such reservations about our own contributions and ideas.) Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on May 16, 2007 at 10:17 AM
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A couple of buddies pointed me toward Sys-Con Media's Top 150 Information Technology Heroes, and I have to admit it was fun (once you click past the obstructing ad anyway). While my first reaction was to want to point out omissions (see below), what's not to like about a list that mixes Dennis Ritchie, Luca Cardelli, Edsger Dijkstra, and Charles Babbage? Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on March 09, 2007 at 02:26 PM
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Sorry to have been dark for the last couple of months. Things have been very busy indeed for the Zimbra team, but it is gratifying to have some of our longer-term engineering efforts baring fruit: in addition to the release of 4.5 (more info here) and opening up our product management portal for your input, we have now posted the beta release of our software appliance distribution for ZCS! Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on March 01, 2007 at 02:42 PM
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(FYI: I've made some enhancements/corrections based on Zimbra's participation at the Office 2.0 Conference; pointer below. May or may not be worth a quick reread.)
Yes, the "2.0" hype is getting out of hand. However, just as with Web 2.0, the technology evolution we are participating in is sufficent to at least justify the discussion. So while I am still dubious about the Office 2.0 moniker, there is no doubt that the Web authoring, sharing, and collaboration technologies under the Web 2.0 umbrella are allowing us to do many of the things we used to do within proprietary Office 1.0 desktop applications, and to do so from any browser on the net. So before you dismiss Office 2.0 as yet another buzz word du jour, please consider some (modest) over-generalizations: Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on October 17, 2006 at 03:43 AM
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To continue the Zimbra blog series on Ajax (recent entries include Ajax innovation is about the server, Ajax optimization techniques (presented at OSCON), OpenAjax update, and Ajax's impact on scaling), we wanted to offer some general thoughts on securing Ajax applications gleaned, of course, from our Zimbra experience. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on September 09, 2006 at 10:45 AM
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I had the pleasure of joining Motorola, SugarCRM, and Funambol on a panel at LinuxWorld regarding the future of mobility. The depressing bit was that we panelists admitted that we could have made almost identical points three years ago: (1) the Web (1.0 more than 2.0) is coming soon to mobile devices, but the experience isn't entirely there yet; and (2) the challenge to extending applications for mobile devices continues to be exacerbated by innovation in device profiles (more on that below). However, the good news is (1) that a "smart phone" profile is converging---a profile that is likely the right target for non-consumer mobile applications; and (2) that "over the air" sync to the native Personal Information Management (PIM) software on mobile devices has gotten dramatically easier/cheaper, and provides exciting new opportunities for mobile application extension. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on August 29, 2006 at 11:50 AM
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I got myself in a small bit of trouble recently talking about open source IP ownership when I should have been talking about the cool new collaboration and mobile features in the 4.0 release of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. (Nothing like a developer coming by your cube and saying "You said what?") While I didn't do such a good job at the time, the underlying point is an important one, so I'm going to give it another shot ... Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on August 15, 2006 at 08:58 AM
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I have a pet peeve about suggestions that all these exciting Web 2.0 innovations are solely realized within browser-resident Ajax/JavaScript code. For example, consider occasional inquiries regarding a desire to marry Zimbra's sexy Ajax enduser and administrative UIs with, say, a more mature back-end messaging server. Obviously, one way to respond to such requests is to continue to prove out the Zimbra server's fault tolerance, scalability, and performance. But I think such requests are more fundamentally misguided. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on August 01, 2006 at 06:30 PM
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The Zimbra team has just posted the PDF of a benchmarking study that we recently completed with HP. This particular study targets a service provider (Telco, ISP) consumer-facing deployment. (We are also at work on benchmarks for large and medium business profiles that you can expect to see shortly.) The end result was that ZCS delivered consistent and excellent response times while scaling up to 50,000 concurrent/active users and multiple 100,000s of provisioned users per dual-core/dual CPU PC-class server! The Zimbra Community should be thrilled by these results---we are effectively not giving up anything in terms of performance and scale to existing service provider solutions, and we have a dramatically richer feature set to boot. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on August 01, 2006 at 08:37 AM
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Most successful open source projects started out as open source. Zimbra took a different path: We cranked code for nearly two years in stealth mode before making the first public release of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in open source in August of ’05. Since then, of course, it’s been a wild ride: Zimbra is now arguably the most popular open source technology in its category of messaging and collaboration servers. Zimbra’s success has led to inquiries from the owners of existing closed source software that are considering open source as a means to replicate that success. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on June 20, 2006 at 07:36 AM
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(Caveat: this is indeed a retread, but the original content has been sufficiently revised that I'm electing to republish.)
While most of the Web 2.0 focus has been on the consumer (Zimbra being a notable exception), I visited a large corporation (call it Acme) that was working on their response to these new technologies and business models, and calling the overall effort "Acme 2.0". Ouch. (On the choice of name, that is—I think the effort is a fine idea.) My fear is that like ".Com" before it, Web 2.0 is at risk of overheating as a buzz word. I think we are seeing this in some of the softer marketing slogans such as "Collaborative Web" or "Live Web". Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on June 02, 2006 at 08:35 AM
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Statements to the effect that "open source software is unreliable" are disingenuous. With 120,000 software projects on SourceForge, it is pretty silly to make any generalizations about open source quality. One might just as well say that "all proprietary software is reliable," although experience easily dismisses any such misconception. The reality is that most software (open source as well as proprietary) is of insufficiently high quality from the enduser's perspective, and the current brouhaha is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on May 30, 2006 at 07:03 PM
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I had the opportunity to keynote at the New Industry Leaders Summit (NILS) in Japan last Thursday. In a follow-up panel on open source, an audience member asked one of the better questions I’ve heard recently: “If open source, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 technologies are driving down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of software as you say, won’t that cause our industry to shrink?” I’d heard a similar refrain before: When we at Zimbra made the decision to go open source, some of my old-school buddies felt we might ultimately be taking food from their progeny’s plates. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on May 30, 2006 at 06:05 AM
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So the OpenAjax Alliance had its first face-to-face summit this week in San Francisco. Up until now, IBM's tireless shuttle diplomacy has been the primary mover, but no doubt it's going to get tougher to herd the cats with them all in one room :-). As someone who had the good fortune to be there when the initial OpenAjax seeds were planted, it is exciting to see the uptake of these efforts by so many talented companies. While I think it inappropriate for me to provide any color commentary on the meeting discussions (watch Dion and the crew at www.ajaxian.com for that), I do feel comfortable sharing the somewhat controversial (?) charge that Zimbra gave to the OpenAjax group: Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on May 16, 2006 at 08:25 AM
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Our discussion of Zimbra server scaling has engendered at least one spin-off: The question of the impact of rich Ajax client applications on the servers that support them. Let's consider the big picture first, and then we will dig into Ajax ... Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on April 24, 2006 at 12:30 PM
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We are now working with some of the Zimbra early adopters on larger-scale deployments, including enduser deployments upwards of 100 thousand mailboxes, and hosted/internet service provider deployments north of 1 million mailboxes. In general, the individual (per mailbox) profiles tends to be on the smaller side (typically, <100 messages/day, <200Mb average mailbox size), but the aggregate workloads are nevertheless substantial, and are helping prove out the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for very-large scale distributed deployments. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on April 17, 2006 at 12:00 PM
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This blog entry has been burning a hole in my pocket for a few weeks, but it’s on the more esoteric topic of open source licensing, so those looking for exciting new tech ought to instead check our Ross’ blog on ALE (Ajax Linking & Embedding).
As most of probably already know, Zimbra chose the Mozilla Public License (MPL) for our open source licensing. One of the questions we are most asked by our friends at other open source efforts is why we chose the MPL. In the next breath they usually ask why we didn’t choose MPL’s even more popular cousin, the GNU General Public License (GPL), which we also considered very closely. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on April 04, 2006 at 08:15 AM
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Zimbra had the good fortune to get tapped for Business 2.0's Next Net 25 and last week had the chance to go hang out with the Business 2.0 gurus---Erick Schonfeld, Om Malik, and Michael Copeland---as well as with most of the our fellow entrepreneurs that made the cut.
While it was a tough group to get to work well together in one room---lots of opinionated talkers and not that many listeners (myself included :-)), with divergent agendas, half of us focused on the consumer and half focused on businesses, the discussion thread I had the most fun with was what will be the next, next big thing. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on March 09, 2006 at 01:36 PM
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Last week I got to represent Zimbra at a dinner of open source luminaries that coincided with OSBC West. At one point, I was asked what was new in Zimbra-land, and I got to mention that we'd rolled out our GA in early February, and (I confess I made a bit of a dramatic pause here) we were also rolling out our first 100,000 seat enterprise deployment. (In service provider land, Zimbra is now ramping up seven figure deployments.) This garnered Zimbra warm congratulations, but also some incredulity. "After all, you'd only publicly launched Zimbra 4 months ago, and you've already got a 100,000 seat enterprise customer ramping up?"
What I did say was that Zimbra team had been hard at work since 03, and that the technology had been in private customer trials since early 05. Weak. What I should have said was ... Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on February 20, 2006 at 06:30 AM
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The email archiving market is growing explosively with the proliferation of retention and compliance policies (often motivated by the increased regulatory overhead of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and so on).
While email archiving is frequently grouped with more general-purpose archiving and data warehousing solutions designed for files and databases, the underlying requirements are actually very different ... Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on February 19, 2006 at 01:54 PM
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There is a healthy, ongoing debate---for example, check out Phil Wainewright's ZDNet blog or our own prior efforts---over whether email (and associated functions like group calendaring, contact management, enterprise IM and so on) should be delivered via
(1) On-premises software that you configure and manage yourself;
(2) Outsourcing to dedicated service providers (e.g., EDS, IBM Global Services) that manage to your custom requirements (using dedicated hardware/software, often that you transition to them); or
(3) Outsourcing to generic hosted or application service providers (think Salesforce.com, but for email), who often aggregate email with other services (e.g., broadband, telephony) or applications (e.g., Microsoft Office Live). Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on February 19, 2006 at 09:31 AM
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As it is realized within Zimbra and most other Ajax applications today, development is accomplished via GUI, object-oriented programming in Javascript. (Please see Ajax Programming Report Card and Ajax Sweet Spots.) This is the sort of work that developers with Java SWT, Java Swing, or C# skills will accel in at, but also the sort of work that will leave some Web designers (e.g., Dreamweaver or Frontpage users that have not dabbled in OO programming) scratching their heads. The success of technologies like PHP, ASP, and JSP is that they helped bridge the gap between UI "programming" and UI "designing." Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on December 12, 2005 at 03:43 PM
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To enter a mature market, start-ups need there to be dislocators or "sea changes" in technology or business model or, better yet, both.
For example, WebLogic (my last time around the block) benefited from three technology dislocators and one business model dislocator:
(1) The emergence of the Web, and the associated requirement to deliver Web-enabled applications;
(2) The emergence of Java (a.k.a. managed code);
(3) The definition of a set of standard programming models for server-side Java (a.k.a. J2EE); and
(4) The use of the free trial Internet download to allow programmers to self-select (and to bypass the historical top-down sales cycle).
(Even with those dislocators going for us, we still had to coin a new category name---"Web Application Server", because there was no way the venture capitalists were going to invest in a Java transaction processing monitor. Further evidence for those dislocations is Microsoft upgrading from Visual Basic and DCOM to C# and .NET, which the Java and J2EE communities can and should take credit for motivating.)
As Zimbra is poised to enter another mature market against very talented, deep-pocketed incumbents like Microsoft, we had better make sure we have some significant dislocators going for us. Here's my short list of technology sea changes: Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on November 18, 2005 at 07:06 AM
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Ajax hype is in full swing. Ajax may be the most promising "new" UI technology since HTML (Ajax programming report card discusses why), but there are now discussions of whether and when Ajax is going to displace Windows and Office. Over the top I think.
At the same time, there is a very compelling case to look to Ajax for Internet services, ASPs, B2C and B2B applications, and especially Email/messaging and collaboration (see below).
How do we identify the sweet and not-so-sweet spots for Ajax? Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on October 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM
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For a term that was only coined early in 05 (Thanks Mr. Garrett---perhaps like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, we had no idea how we were going to describe the new Web UI we started two years ago), Ajax clearly rates an A in terms of generating buzz. The fair question now is to what degree the reality can live up to the hype.
After looking at the Zimbra Ajax client, Paul Ambrose (one of the WebLogic founders and a good friend) said “There is a special place in heaven reserved for whoever had the patience to get all the Javascript programming right.” On the mark I think. Building rich UI in Ajax today is simply too hard. For the systems programming teams of the leading web properties (e.g., Google, Yahoo!) and platform software companies (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, and little Zimbra), it is in reach now. But if we in the industry want to see Ajax follow in the footsteps of other Web UI technologies (PHP, ASP, JSP, and so on), we still have a lot of work to do. Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on October 30, 2005 at 11:52 AM
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One question I'm answering a lot these days is "Why Email?"
In my prior life (CTO of WebLogic/BEA Systems) I was chained to my email for a minimum of 3-4 hours per day. Even while traveling to Asia or Europe, my admin. had to carve out an additional 2.5 hours of time from every meeting day for email. No doubt much of this overhead was due to sheer volumes (hundred+ inbound per day, not counting spam and mailing lists). But I also became convinced that I was wasting perhaps 1/3 of that time on tasks that my email software should have been doing for me:
(1) Sorting/moving email across north of 600 nested folders so I could hopefully find communications again (my self-defined sorting system probably worked 75% of the time; other times I would give up before finding the thread I was looking for);
(2) Managing external/internal conversations between customers and tech. leaders---At least ten times a day, a sales/customer question was sent to me. As CTO, I often (probably most often) didn't know the answer, but I did know who did, and so I had to play intermediary in forwarding and editing responses;
(3) Managing the workflow of communications to make sure none of the balls got dropped (To accomplish this, I had "hot", "hotter", "hottest", "on hold", and so on "staging" folders);
(4) Switching context from email to my contacts, email to my calendar, email to other web applications, etc. and then having to hand cut and paste content from one to the other; and
(5) Waiting for my email client while it sync'ed with my email server (consuming most of my client CPU and bandwidth in the process).
Like many other power users I have commiserated with, email became the most frustrating application I had to deal with, and it was the one that I was spending the most time on by at least an order of magnitude. How can it be that Yahoo! and Google are offering innovative, Web 2.0 email solutions with a gigabyte+ of storage for free, while my corporate messaging is still stuck in the mid 90's?
What I decided I was seeking was more of a "Web 2.0" solution:
(1) Rich search that covered every syntactic aspect of email and the associated attachments, so that I could always lay my fingers on what I was looking for without that a prior foldering overhead;
(2) Conversation management that spanned folders, so when new communications came in, they would be automatically correlated to relevant content in my archives;
(3) Content that was automatically linked to Web and enterprise applications: When a customer case number was included in email, why did I have to cut and paste it by hand into our product support system? When a travel itinerary showed up, why did I have to cut and paste it into my calendar, to print tickets, or to check for on-time status? What I really wanted as an AJAX-style "mash up" of email and the relevant application right there in my email client! That, by the way, is the real power of AJAX for email---not just the zero install/zero-management client: If the browser is the defacto pull interface, then email is the defacto push interface, and an AJAX messaging client allows the user to mix-and-match both paradigms without switching UIs.
What was surprising to me after my first six months as a Zimbrian is how similarly frustrated the system administrators are with the day-to-day care and feeding of enterprise messaging deployments. Laments I hear include:
(1) Why don't I have out of the box compatibility with my existing messaging PC and wireless clients?: Outlook---on-line and off-line, Apple Mail & iCal, Evolution, Thunderbird/Sunbird, Eudora, Blackberry, Good, Treo, Nokia, and so on;
(2) Why are messaging servers "black boxes" that prevent me from understanding what's on the disk, making my own back-ups, and reasoning about scalability?;
(4) Why do I have to restore an entire storage group to recover an individual user's mailbox at a particular point in time?
(5) Why do I have to buy enough SAN or NAS storage to redundantly store email attachments once per user (some systems) or once per storage group (other systems)?
(6) Why do I have to bolt on and then manage complex, unintegrated solutions for retention & archiving, replication & disaster recovery, HSM, and discovery/cross mailbox search when all of these services could be provided in a more integrated fashion?
(7) Why do I have to install and configure VPN and client software on every machine required to support email (including my employee's home systems) when the web security model and AJAX provide such a rich, zero administration client experience?
(8) Why can't I prevent potentially dangerous attachments from being downloaded to less protected clients by instead opening them on secured (Unix) servers with the latest anti-virus software, and providing an HTML rendering of relevant documents to those clients?
Hopefully, you agree---email today is well short of what email could and should be. So that's why email was the best choice for me---the opportunity work with a great team to strive to deliver a compelling better user and administrative experience was simply too much fun to pass up.
Posted by Scott on September 27, 2005 at 09:08 AM
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We are frequently asked whether or not you should choose a hosted deployment for Zimbra. Since we have strategic partners offering Zimbra as a hosted service (or at least we will with our generally-available release), we do endeavor to be unbiased in advising you on the hosted versus on-premises decision.
Dean Jacobs (one of the former WebLogic architects, and now at Salesforce) eloquently makes the case for hosted software over on-premises software http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=320. Rather than echo many of his arguments, we suggest that in reality there is a spectrum of deployment options available to you:
• Hosting via hosted- and application-service providers (HSPs & ASPs), generally via generic (a.k.a. shared) hardware and software;
• Off-premises outsourcing –- Hardware and software is dedicated to your business, accessed over the WAN/VPN and administered externally;
• On-premises outsourcing -- Your LAN as well as dedicated hardware and software, but outsourced administration;
• Appliances –- On-premises, dedicated hardware, albeit with reduced administration overhead (which can itself be outsourced); and
• On-premises software
Given the broad range of software required by a small and medium-sized business (SMB), by a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), and by a large enterprise, one size simply does not fit all---even within a company, let alone between companies. Thus far (at least for email/messaging), SMBs have been the mosted interested in pure hosting, while SMEs and enterprises have been more interested in on- and off-premises outsourcing as well as traditional on-premises software. Appliances, interestingly enough, seem to have appeal from larger SMBs all the way up to enterprises.
In order to find the sweet spot for a particular application, here are some of the trade-offs to weigh:
1. Integration with internal applications –- HSPs and ASPs do often provide integration points for other (generally on-premises) applications to securely access (consume) services and data (such as the web service bindings available for Salesforce). However, choosing to host applications that must consume services and data from other enterprise applications can be more challenging (see customization). The latter is often more of an issue for solutions like Zimbra, that support easy linking to your enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, and so on). While this can be done securely for applications that export web services, integration of applications deployed across multiple sights inherently entails additional overhead (e.g., in configuration, security, and performance).
2. Customization of applications –- Hosting’s (as well as an appliance’s) sweet spot is when you can use the application “as is”---that is, without any customization of the business logic to your specific workflows and without integration with other in-house applications. While some HSPs and ASPs are attempting to support the hosting of custom applications, the reality is that this business is inherently more one of an outsourced service offering rather than generic hosting. This is because your provider must understand your customizations in order to manage them, as well as to figure out how to merge them into future releases. Customization for horizontal platform offerings like Zimbra is often less of an issue than for more vertical business applications.
3. Performance -- Hosted and application service providers amortize hardware and network investments across multiple companies (indeed, this is one of their selling points). Such sharing can allow faster hardware to be shared across users, but it can equally lead to contention for those shared resources. Moreover, hosted services are located across the WAN, and hence inherently face additional latency.
4. Protection from WAN outages – Hosted- and application-service providers can often do an even better job of providing uptime for their application or service, since it is their core expertise. At the same time, however, such deployments are inherently more vulnerable to WAN connectivity problems. For on-premises email, temporary WAN problems are often masked from the end-user (since they are using the WAN asynchronously).
5. Security –- Like performance, security cuts both ways. VPNs/SSL and careful hardening can ensure greater data privacy even for hosted deployments. On the other hand, with an HSP/ASP your companies data is being hosted outside of your firewall and outside of your direct control.
6. Archiving and compliance –- With the emergence of retention policies and new regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, there are inherent questions about whether external providers are prepared to honor your precise policy requirements. On the other hand, if your policies are close to industry norms, an external provider may well be able to do it more efficiently than you can do in-house.
Any that we missed?
From our perspective at Zimbra, the key is to strive to architect Zimbra in a sufficiently balanced way that it supports this spectrum of deployment models---meaning that we need to get multi-tenancy, delegated administration, intra-server security, etc. right for hosting, as well as the easy install and compatibility with existing infrastructure for on-premises deployments. The good news is the vast majority of the Zimbra Community's work (and hence the Zimbra codebase) is focused on improving both the enduser's and system administrator's experience, and hence relevant to all Zimbra users.
Posted by Scott on September 20, 2005 at 04:40 PM
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We have been quite happy with the response thus far to the name Zimbra. Hopefully, Zimbra is growing on you the same way it’s been growing on us.
The name Zimbra comes to us from Talking Heads’ (our choice for best band of the 80s) tune "I Zimbra", which can be found on Fear of Music (which ought, by the way, to be in your collection). Zimbra alone, of the thousands of names that we considered, came out of a desperate late night search through the CD collection to head off alternative names like HobNob, AquaFront, and Oompa Zing. (We’re use failed company names for our conference rooms, and there’s no possibility of our ever running out.)
Zimbra came to the Heads via Dadaism, which Wikipedia defines in part as a “protest against an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.” Hugo Ball, a Dadaistic poet, wrote a nonsensical poem---Gadji beri bimba---just for the sound of it, and then Talking Heads made poem into song.
Zimbra apparently also means “Juniper” in Portuguese, but the term doesn’t seem to be in very common use. (At least, my Brazilian friends hadn’t heard of it.)
But we figured all that stuff out after the fact. The reality is that we just like the sound of Zimbra, and admittedly several of us still love the Heads.
I think to date naming may have been the single hardest thing the company formerly known as Liquid Systems has had to get done. Naming is hard, because
• It’s one thing nearly every employee and perspective community member cares passionately about;
• You have to endeavor to avoid collisions with many thousands of commercial software products (since every man or woman and his/her dog can have a commercial software product);
• You also have to endeavor to avoid collisions with 100,000+ open source projects;
• You need something that anyone can easily spell once they’ve heard it (I learned this lesson the hard way---“Tengah” was at one time the name for the WebLogic Server); and
• Of course, you need to be able to get the URL and trademark (both of which would have been challenging if we’d tried to keep the name Liquid).
Looking forward, however, there’s one part of naming that we still haven’t sorted: What do we call the members of the greater Zimbra community?
• Zimbrainians
• Zimbracans
• Zimbradors
• Zimbrashers
Your vote or additional contributions would be most welcome on this blog thread.
Posted by Scott on September 12, 2005 at 02:02 PM
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Continue reading...
Posted by Scott on August 26, 2005 at 04:33 PM
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