What’s New in Zimbra Collaboration Server 7.0

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Simple, Robust Management and Administration

Many of the advances in Zimbra Collaboration Server 7.0 focus on today’s key total cost-of-ownership (TCO) drivers including the ever-growing need to streamline management, enhance performance and scalability, and deliver services designed for Cloud deployment and virtualization.

Below are key platform management highlights for IT administrators and datacenter professionals.

Policies for Restoring Deleted Data

Administrators are now able to set policies via Class of Service (CoS) in the Admin Console for self-recovery of email and events previously emptied from Trash folders. This eliminates costly Help Desk calls since end users are able to open their own Trash folders and selected deleted items and recover them back into the Email inbox or Calendar. Policies are configurable and dependent on available storage.

NFS Support with VMware vSphere

When Zimbra is deployed as a virtual appliance or with a guest operating system running on VMware vSphere 4.x, all Zimbra server and storage components (i.e. LDAP, indexes, primary and secondary datastore) are supported on NFS datastores.

The NFS datastore must be presented to the ESX host and VMDK disk devices allocated to the Zimbra Virtual Machines. (Mounting the NFS datastore directly to the guest operating system or using a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is not supported).

Core Performance and Scalability Enhancements

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 7.0 includes many core updates of components that provide performance and stability improvements, including updated versions of MySQL and Ngnix.

Notable performance enhancements include reduced CPU utilization on mailbox servers by 20%; improved IMAP IO and memory usage to support 30% more concurrent IMAP connections per server; and reduced CPU utilization and LDAP traffic with sharing and ACL calculation.

Manage Licensed Feature Usage

Administrators have improved visibility and control over the licensed features they plan to deploy including use of the Zimbra Connector for MS Outlook. Licensed features can be managed via Class of Service (CoS) to ensure compliance with license limits.

New Distribution List and MTA Policy Management

It is now possible for administrators to quickly set access control policies on Distribution Lists, such as to make them internal-only or block specific users from sending to them. (End users can now also see members of distribution lists in the Zimbra web client).

Additionally, ClueBringer PolicyD (cbpolicyd) has been included in the Zimbra MTA package with a default quotas module to implement mail throttling. Additional modules can be implemented for custom configurations.

Other Notable Management Enhancements:

  • Configurable Draft AutoSave Time. Administrators may now choose the interval between AutoSaves of drafts during Email Compose.
  • Zimbra Server Migration and Import. Choose to import accounts from other Zimbra Servers and Directories.
  • Calendar Resources in External Directories. External directories, such as Active Directory, may now be used as the source of rooms / resources in Calendar.
  • Allow Users to Update Passwords in External Directories. When an external directory is used for authentication, users may now use Zimbra web client to reset the password if configured by the administrator.
  • New Server Operating Systems and Lifecycle Policies. Several new operating system versions have been introduced including Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (64bit) and betas of RHEL 6 (64bit) and Fedora 13 (64bit). Additionally 32bit server support is being deprecated as part of an updated Server Lifecycle Support Policy update.