Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition
Zimbra is a client and server platform for next-generation messaging and collaboration.
Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition provides administrators and their end users innovative features that solve the challenges faced by organizations using today's legacy communications infrastructure.
Key advantages include:
- compatibility with Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop environments;
- better scalability and ease of maintenance; and
- flexibility to integrate other applications as web services in our AJAX web client.
The Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition is available for your download free of charge. You are welcome to use, modify, and redistribute the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition free of charge, provided you do so according to the terms of the appropriate License.
Have more demanding day-to-day operations?
Try Zimbra Collaboration Network Edition.
Why Network Edition?
- Access to Support Portal. Email, and phone crisis support plus file and track feature enhancements
- Desktop client compatibility. Sync mail, contacts, and calendar to Microsoft Outlook and/or to Apple
- Professional administration. Real time mailbox backup and restore, high availability clustering, storage cost management
- Zimbra Mobile. Over-the-air synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar data with mobile devices
- Advanced web productivity. Search for content inside attachments and view attachments as HTML
- Domain management. Ability to re-brand the web client and administer multiple customer domains
Join the Community
We welcome all Open Source Edition users to join the Zimbra Community, and invite you to share contributions of bug-fixes, enhancements, or other modifications with Zimbra for consideration for inclusion in Zimbra.
How to Contribute
Do you have an idea for improving Zimbra? Have you developed a great mash-up? Zimbra is excited to take contributions that advance the quality and innovation of its collaboration platform.
Our principal reason for open sourcing Zimbra Collaboration is our hope to grow a thriving community around this technology. To that end, we cordially invite developers and systems administrators to join the newly inaugurated Zimbra Community in order to:
Help scrutinize our architecture and code in order to make Zimbra more reliable and more secure Shape future releases of Zimbra by helping us to prioritize the Zimbra engineering team's projects Provide value-add in the form of general purpose integrations, customizations, or extensions to Zimbra, which can (at the creator's discretion) be posted on the Zimbra community site (irrespective of any overlap with native Zimbra capabilities)
Integration may be of particular interest - Zimbra is an extensible collaboration platform that will provide programmatic and/or XML/web service bindings for:
- "Inbound" applications to submit tasks, schedule meetings, etc. At present, such bindings are in the form of XML/SOAP network interfaces to the Zimbra Collaboration Server, but we also encourage the development of generic application developer kits (API libraries) for invoking Zimbra services from Java, PHP, Python, C/C++, C#, and so on
- Defining actionable email content that provide "outbound" links to applications, such as purchase order approval, package tracking, integration with 3rd-party enterprise software such as CRM, SFA, and ERP
- Higher-level workflow tools for defining and executing document-oriented business processes within email
- Implementing custom, business-dependent security or usage policies
- All of these, of course, are fair game for community members. We are happy to make any such value-added technologies licensed as open source available to the rest of the Zimbra Community via the Zimbra site. (And if we get enough of them over time, we will even track relative popularity.)
We also welcome submitted code - ranging from bug fixes to substantial new features - for possible inclusion in the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition. Submissions must be accompanied by an executed contribution agreement, which is more restrictive than the sharing model embodied within open source licenses. Questions? Please see the Zimbra Contributions FAQ.
Resources and Support
- Forums - Subscribe to forums, ask questions and participate in the Zimbra community.
- Blog - Read the latest thoughts from the Zimbra team on how to improve collaboration and messaging.
- Third-party open source projects - The Zimbra Project leverages other leading open source technologies such as Linux, MySQL, Postfix, and Apache. Get the full scoop here.
- Whitepapers - There are numerous Zimbra whitepapers that cover what's wrong with email, the architecture of Zimbra Collaboration, compatibility with Outlook, and so on.
- Open source licensing - With the release of Collaboration 8.5, Zimbra officially moved to Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.
- Gallery - view Themes and Zimlets to get ideas about what you can make
- Bugzilla - Submit bug fix or enhancement, or see the open bugs and if there is anything you'd like to work on.
- Top Projects - Our team has assembled a contributions wish list to help you get started.
- Languages - The Community is active translating, start a new one or join a team.
