eBox testing environment ANSTE one of O’Reilly’s Beautiful Testing essays

Posted on October 29, 2009
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We’re proud to announce that an essay regarding the Advanced Network Service Testing Environment (ANSTE) that was developed in order to carry out eBox Platform testing has been included in O’Reilly’s Beautiful Testing book that is to be published on the 30th of October. Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher, offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art.

“eBox Platform is a complex tool that integrates a number of independent network services, released as a set of independent modules that need to be thoroughly tested to prevent regressions and to verify the correct functioning of each feature” said Isaac Clerencia, author of the “Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios” essay and developer at eBox Technologies. “After a year or so since we started developing eBox Platform, getting a new release out had become a struggle due to the lengthy testing and quality assurance process. What is more, these tasks had quickly become the most dreaded ones among eBox developers and we figured out that something had to be done.”

“As we couldn’t find an existing testing tool that would suit our needs, we ended developing our own open source testing suite” said José Antonio Calvo, ANSTE developer and developer at eBox Technologies, and continued “the result was ANSTE that allows you to easily define complex network scenarios with multiple virtual machines, to run or to remotely schedule the tests according to pre-defined test suites that include command-based and Selenium-based tests and finally obtain a full report that is made available through a web interface.”

“We think ANSTE is a beautiful network service testing solution that can help in the testing process of any software that involves several machines connected to a network” said Isaac Clerencia. “ANSTE has already been successfully used to test MySQL clusters and we think it could also be useful for other projects, such as XMMP or Squid, for example. We are extremely glad for being included in the Beautiful Testing to give more visibility to the project for a good cause.”

More about Beautiful Testing
Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher. Copyright 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 978-0-596-15981-8. Available at: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159818/ All royalties from this book will be donated to the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign.

More about ANSTE
ANSTE is a testing environment for advanced network services, mainly intended to automatize the integration tests of eBox Platform, furthermore it could be used to other similar purposes. ANSTE is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the project’s trac and source code are available at: http://public.warp.es/anste

New screencast on how to set up a VPN with eBox Platform

Posted on October 23, 2009
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We’re glad to announce that we’ve put together a screencast on how to set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) with eBox Platform. The screencast shows step-by-step how to create and configure a Certification Authority (CA), user certificates, a VPN server and the clients with eBox.

Together with the official documentation regarding VPN set up you should be able to allow secure access to the corporate network to remote users and secure interconnection of geographically distant networks.

You can also find interesting the screencast on Basic Network Configuration or if you are a professional eBox user, the screencast on eBox Control Center.

You can view the screencasts also at YouTube:
Setting up a VPN with eBox Platform
Basic Network Configuration with eBox Platform
eBox Control Center

Defining an Evolution of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite: Version 6.0

Posted on October 23, 2009
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Zimbra’s massive user base means our new product releases reach farther than ever before. How far? Consider our 50 million paid mailbox count. With that comes the responsibility to make our solutions exactly what people need when it comes to shaping the future of communication.

So what are some of the top requested features included in the first release of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0?

Sync your phone like never before.

We’ve added user trigger-able device wipe, server policies, and tasks to the existing MobileSync support for email, contacts, and appointments.

Arrange and personalize the interface.

Read and compose multiple messages in tabs without the need for pop-out windows using the advanced AJAX client. Widescreen? Move the reading pane to the side.

Presentation Framework.

Create new presentations (as well as documents and spreadsheets) from the briefcase – no need for external software to run them.

Calendar views. Direct CalDav connections. Streamlined contacts.

Our feature rich UI has new layouts including fisyeye and a sortable list view. Access an external ICS/CalDAV url – with adjustable automatic update polling frequencies. For the address book: Rather than pages of blanks to fill out, add only the contact fields you want.

Lite-client overhauls galore.

The standard HTML client now includes all our primary apps, plus the ability to drag items like it’s AJAX cousin. Using a web-browser on your mobile device? There’s multiple variants based on device type and connection speed. We’ve added appointment management functionality to the portable web-client, a simplified login page, as well as file access.

Role based administration.

Delegate. Empower distribution list managers without worrying about them accidentially changing major server settings. Even let someone add or remove members, but not create or delete existing lists – the views and ACL rights are that customizable. Hosting providers can now give one account permission to manage multiple domains or adjust class-of-service features.

Connect with your social world.

Zimlets now have the ability to define application or preferences tabs. So use the new Social Zimlet to manage Twitter, Facebook, or just browse Digg. Try the Discover Zimlet to visit all that Del.icio.us has to offer.

Share Management.

Join a new group? Get up to speed fast – receive and an instant email about all the available shares. Didn’t accept that invite long ago but turns out you need something? Rather than digging it up, just use the new share tool to see what you have permissions on; or have given to others.

Server Architecture Improvements.

A few of the powerful under-the-hood changes include a new OpenLDAP engine with the ability to make on the fly config tweaks, SQLite & RRD for logger, customizable hierarchical storage queries. Plus we’ve exposed a UI for the stats service – giving you quick insight on just about everything you can think of.

Someone on the Zimbra freenode channel recently asked: “Why skip the usual numbering scheme?” Well, we felt the above along with several hundred other groundbreaking enhancements made it worthy of a major revision number instead of a more modest 5.5 designation. Be sure to checkout read receipts, browseable company directories (global address list sync folders), on-behalf sending options, print size controls, published (self-enabled) Zimlet settings, fast on-demand/header-first sync in the Outlook connector, and the ability to run filters over existing items.

We’ll have to stop listing improvements there, but the great strides of Zimbra’s growth trajectory can ultimately be traced back to the power of our partner model and community ecosystem. While we don’t reflect Open Source Edition users in our metrics, everyone here certainly recognizes their role in making the Zimbra Server what it is today. So no matter which edition you use, our engineering team invites you to leave us some feedback on version 6.0.1 over in the forums. What features do you want to see implemented next? Let us know below, or test the nightly builds for a glimpse of aspects like pressure based page scrolling, support for the CardDav standard, and the ability to remove attachments but retain an email body; all of which are just a heartbeat away.

Try it now: Experience collaborative messaging and groupware done right – play with some of the above using a sample account on our live hosted demo.

Download ZCS: Grab the open source edition, it’s completely free to use and even modify code to your delight; or get the network version packed with extras.

Announcing Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0: 50+ Million Users Have Spoken

Posted on October 23, 2009
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With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3^rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later today in a deep-dive blog post.

But that’s not the only recent milestone: Did you ever wonder what Zimbra and South Africa have in common? No it’s not our love for South African Hip Hop or Kwaito … it is that Zimbra just bested their population of 49.3 million because today, we have surpassed the 50,000,000th paid mailbox mark. Meaning if all Zimbra users made up their own country they would be the 25^th most populous in the world, edging up on Italy (Pasta anyone?). It’s amazing that we were able to gain ten million paid mailboxes just six months after reaching 40 million. Those 50 million accounts are spread across over 100,000 organizations that are now using Zimbra throughout the globe. That leap can only be attributed to our wonderful collection of partners and developers who continually remind us what people need so we can deliver the best collaboration product on the market.

We’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers – from enterprises such as Mediacom and WebMD, to new government organizations including The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Oman’s Ministry of Health; to educational institutions like Swarthmore College, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

Below are images a new mash-up built around ZCS 6 platform enhancements enabling Zimlets to be core application tabs. “Zimbra Social” keeps you on top of all your Facebook, Twitter and Digg goodness.