AMTRON delivers 28,000 Ubuntu-based PCs to students in Assam

Posted on April 20, 2009
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AMTRON delivers 28,000 Ubuntu-based PCs to students in Assam

Summary

India-based government information and communication technologies (ICT) provider The Assam Electronics Development Corporation (AMTRON) needed to provide every Assam student who achieved 60 per cent or higher in their school leaving exams with a free PC. AMTRON needed to comply with strict budgets to deliver reliable, easy-to-use PCs to thousands of students. It finally decided on a range of PC hardware running Ubuntu Desktop Edition.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0 Beta (Codename: Guns N’ Roses)

Posted on April 17, 2009
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Few things get our community excited like a major release version of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Today marks availability of the first GnR preview: ZCS 6.0 Beta 1 Open Source Edition. Admins and developers can find it over on the downloads page, for the less technically inclined we’ll also have a new hosted demo up shortly.

Some feature highlights:

» A new horizontal ‘three panel’ view with the message on the right.

» There are now tabs for individual messages as well as the compose page.

» Document & Briefcase access from the standard HTML client.

» Share management & discovery UI that lets you see all shares (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, docs, etc) at a glance. Join a distribution list late? Find all existing shares with the group.

» The ability to run existing email filters over the contents of a folder.

» Did you get it? Know instantly, as read receipts have been implemented in the web-client.

» Improved calendar resource auto-accept/decline conflict handling.

» Calendar fisheye view - previously in Zimbra Desktop, now in ZCS.

» Auto-updating RSS feeds & ICS event URLs on a configurable schedule.

» Per-user blacklists & whitelists are exposed in the revamped mail preferences area.

» ‘Published’ Zimlets management for end users in options. (Zimlets themselves can now define a new application or preferences tab.)

» Mobile web-client overhauls: Including a special mini logon page, better appointment creation, and six new variants based on device type and connection speed.

» Auto-complete from shared address books; and recently used contacts are presented first.

» Configurable spell check on every send.

» On-behalf-of aka sendAs option on compose in shared folders/relationship accounts.

» Appointment list view & refined print layouts.

» Full featured detached message view for the advanced AJAX client.

» Attach files during mail compose directly from the briefcase; in the briefcase UI you can now send as attachments or links.

» Pressure-based scrolling of folder and message list (within the same page).

» OpenLDAP now allows for some on-the-fly configuration changes with zmlocalconfig via a cn=config backend instead of slapd.conf text files for preservation across upgrades.

» GALsync accounts via datasource contact folders with sorting, browsing, and enhanced client usability.

» MySQL as the logger DB has been removed, in favor of more zmstat service implementation mixed with SQLite & RRD for the new logger service.

» Role based delegated permissions on every individual feature. Now you can create distribution list managers, while HSP’s can give someone permission to manage multiple domains from one login. (Available in both network and open source editions - the network edition will include easy admin console configuration.)

There are just too many enhancements to list here so we could only cover a few; check out the beta on a test server, then let us know what you think below or over in the Community Forums. Release notes are here. (Note: We advise against upgrading if using the Posix/Samba add-ons, the process will be documented shortly.) This is the first release of several in our testing cycle; general availability of ZCS 6.0 is targeted for the summer.

eBox Technologies granted an “innovative start-up” status

Posted on April 14, 2009
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eBox Technologies is pleased to announce that since April 2009, the company has been granted an “innovative start-up” status by the CEEIARAGON, Spanish Business Innovation Center that is part of the European Business & Innovation Center Network (EBN). The CEEIARAGON is a business incubator that aims to support foundation of innovative companies to generate economic wealth in the region.

The acceptance in the CEEIARAGON’s business incubation program guarantees eBox Technologies an array of business support resources and services for the next years, including an already much needed larger office space. Starting from the 1st of April, eBox Technologies’ new visiting addres is C/ María de Luna 11, N 19, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain. The main phone number has changed to +34 976 73 35 06 and the fax number to +34 976 73 37 19.

“We are very pleased for being accepted in this program and being backed by CEEIARAGON” said Ignacio Correas, CEO of eBox Technologies. “The company is experiencing tremendous interest in services and products based on eBox Platform and the infrastructure and support provided by the Center is just the platform we need at this moment to respond to the market demand”.

Introducing ZCS for Windows Server

Posted on April 1, 2009
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Zimbra leads the world in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software for Linux and Mac OS X servers. In fact, we recently passed the 40 million paid mailbox milestone. As we have grown, the question often asked is: “When will Zimbra extend its platform support to a given operating system?” Given the success of Zimbra Desktop on Linux, Mac, and Windows - we felt that a server version for Windows as was the next logical choice.

Obviously there are several hurdles going from a Linux environment to Windows, all of the third party applications we rely on need to have freely available cross-platform versions. We’ve partnered with OpenLDAP team, who have stepped up to provide an compatibility patch for a Microsoft Active Directory emulation mode. Combined with a new mail transfer agent written from the ground up, we’re pleased to bring you: Zimbra Collaboration Suite for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

This isn’t the first time we’ve switched a package in favor of our own custom code - in Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 we threw out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch. Replacing Postfix has been the major hurdle for a while now; the engineering team knew that it would be a daunting task.

I already do a lot of my dev work in Eclipse & IntelliJ on Windows. Previously we put PowerShell wrappers around our command line tools to assist more advanced admins. Now we’ve utilized MSI technology to provide the easiest install of a mail server ever.

— Anand Palaniswamy,
Server Team Lead

This extends Zimbra’s reach of services to the most widely deployed operating systems in the world - theoretically any Windows product; though XP, Vista and 7 will not be officially supported on the Network Edition since they don’t have the same long-term backing by Microsoft development teams. Editions tested by our quality assurance group cover the major versions of Windows Server 2008 including Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, HPC (high-performance computing cluster), Web Server, Small Business, Essential Business, and Foundation Server adaptations; in both x86 & x86_64-bit variants. We hope that the community will step up to cover Itanium based processors.

For the future, the server team is working to integrate Zimbra’s Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) with Windows Storage Server, for moving messages and attachments from a primary to a secondary volume based on the age of the message; which lets you to store less frequently accessed data on cheaper disks. Of note, the updates to junctions, reparse points, and symbolic links in recent NTFS versions allows us to do single-instance-storage as well.

We’re playing with .NET access for our SOAP interfaces in the labs. It’s potential is very impressive.

— Kevin Henrikson,
UI Team Lead

The compatibility with Windows will enable a large, new market for our HSP & VAR partners. To quote Jim Morrisroe, VP of the Zimbra Business Unit here at Yahoo: “It is key to delivering on our strategy and commitment to provide the best experience for users and administrators of any messaging platform in the market today. This launch enables us to sell to 2 million new small businesses and enterprises that view Microsoft server technology as integral to their success.”

ZCS version 5.0.15 for Windows platforms is now available on both the Open Source and Network Edition download pages. The Network Edition will be classified as beta until ZCS 6.0 is released - and will then contain the same product support as well as subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. If you have any questions please contact our Windows sales team.

See the ZimbraWindows directory alternative to ZimbraServer in each branch of our public perforce cache for relevant files and build definitions. Try it out - you can leave us feedback thoughts below or over in the Community Forums.