The Most Important Post Ever
Posted on August 1, 2008
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This may be the most important post you will ever read. If you’re a Zimbra Administrator, please read, and pass this onto your colleagues who use Zimbra. If you’re a CTO or CEO, take time to ask your Zimbra Admin about the subject of this post. This blog post is about backups.
Whether your an Open Source User, Zimbra Desktop User, or Network Edition Customer, you can do backups of your data. There is nothing worse than getting a call from a customer, or a Private Message from a Forum User that says, “I need help. My HD has crashed, and all my backups were on that drive.”
Let me Digress for a moment, and share with you my personal experience with backups. It’s sort of a Legend here at Zimbra. It all begins in 2005, Zimbra was the new kid on the block and I was an inexperienced System Linux admin for Tombstone Unified School District in Arizona. This was a small district with limited funds. When I interviewed for the post, the Superintendent handed me his card, and it had a Hotmail address on it. Right then, I knew this would be quite a difficult job.
One of the first things I did, was investigate E-mail Server platforms, and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). A quick search on the interwebs (which is a series of tubes, not to be confused with the you tubes), yielded this new thing called a Zimbra. Much like our millions of Users, I downloaded it and tried it. It worked great! We used the Zimbra Open Source Edition (then it was in Beta).
I was so proud of my cool new setup, and our staff were so excited to finally have good e-mail and calendaring. In knew the importance of keeping backups, and archiving. All of you System Admins at Hospitals and Government institutions know what I mean. You get well acquainted with the Laws and Requirements. So, I would stay up until about midnight, and stop Zimbra, and rsync /opt/zimbra into /opt/zimbra/backups. Keep in mind that this was in the early days of Zimbra, and I wasn’t even an employee yet. As a matter of fact, myself and several others, pioneered the Open Source backup procedure.
Everything was great until one night I noticed I was running low on Disk Space on my /opt partition. So, I thought, “If I just remove all my backups, and make a fresh one, that will save me a bunch of space”. So I ran the following command as root:
rm -rf /opt/zimbra backups
Now, back then, we mounted a clamav partition ramdisk for quarantine purposes. The only indication that I had that something was wrong was when I got an error saying that it couldn’t unmount the partition because it was in use. Everything else in /opt/zimbra was gone…including my backups.
As most of you admins know, preserving data is important. We were involved in several litigation matters, and I would later be cited for obstruction of justice for destroying evidence.
When I noticed what had happened, I immediately called Zimbra and talked with MarcMac here at Zimbra. He tried to recover the inodes using Midnight Commander, but it was a total loss.
Lesson Learned. So, from one admin to another, please take time to make sure your backups are not located on the same machine that Zimbra is on. Please! We never want to hear about data loss. Whether an opensource user or network user, I hope you will take a few minutes to consider your backup strategy, and fix any single points in failure.
Learn from my experience.
-John (jholder)
Zimbra Desktop Beta 3’s New Features
Posted on July 23, 2008
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We’ve aimed to blur the line between a Ajax web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal. If you’re just joining us here’s the best part: It’s an offline capable client so you can take your data with you whenever you don’t have internet access - then sync any type of interaction that you can do in normal webmail access when you get connected again. So many cool new things I don’t know where to begin - the Zimbra Desktop team has been very busy since Beta 2.
They’re here, and your tasks, documents, & briefcase items can now follow you wherever you may roam. If you’re already using Zimbra Desktop against a Zimbra Collaboration Suite server these will show up on next edit or item move via delta sync - while a full account sync or reset will pull in prior items. Personally, having briefcase items available offline is a major plus - as offline calendaring using the same AJAX web-client interface has already long since won me over.
Yahoo! Mail users rejoice - There’s now IMAP access through Zimbra Desktop to all free, plus, and business accounts. You didn’t read that wrong. Normally only Plus accounts have POP access, but as a perk when using Zimbra Desktop the mail is synced via IMAP; which is a much better protocol for keeping your mail organized - and yes it’s available to free accounts as well. Hook-up your @yahoo.com account or go grab one of the new @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses. (Note that some apps don’t sync to Yahoo! servers yet so the data is local.)
Mailto: link handler - For Mac and Windows protocol handlers allow you to click on a mailto: link in any browser, and it will bring-up Zimbra Desktop’s composer with a javascript call. If Prism is not already running, it will start the web-app as well with a url call, then pop up compose. We don’t want to be accidentally invasive, so to turn this feature on you’ll have to check the box in global preferences to make it the default mail client on your computer.
Icon badging - To keep you informed, we now display the total number of unread messages across all-inboxes; in the dock icon for Mac and on Windows there’s now a tray icon, which changes to a new mail image if there are unread messages.
Mac & Windows users may just decide to toss out their toasters, because we now have mail & appointment notifications built-in. (Zimbra Toaster still serves as a lightweight new-mail checker with quick flag and delete features. There’s also some community contributed Linux solutions like Zimbra Notify.)
Zimbra Desktop on Windows now takes advantage of the native tray icon bubbles and on Mac of course we use Growl. (You need to install Growl separately which is quite straightforward.) You’ll also need to enable “show pop-up notification” under both Mail and Calendar tabs in preferences, since by default notifications are turned off.
The latest versions of Zimbra Collaboration Suite have also introduced browser title & favicon flashing, mail & account tab highlighting, as well as sound notifications - which have been ported to Beta 3 as well. So there’s no excuse for not noticing a new mail if you’re at your computer. Ok, we can still think of a few excuses - but note that the pop-up notifications are per account settings; so you can have some accounts on and some accounts off if you should need to ‘forget about’ that important meeting
In-case you’ve never tried Zimbra Desktop, or are still using an Alpha, and never tried it out during Beta 1 or when we served-up Beta 2: There’s also easy setup menus for setting up Zimbra Server, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, AOL, or any other IMAP/POP accounts you want to use. For Beta 3 we’ve thrown out JavaMail and wrote a brand-new robust IMAP/POP client-engine from scratch.
To get you up and running when you need it, there’s now an auto-start service. During launch of the Prism web-app a check is run to see if the background service is running - if not, it’s automatically started. This works on all 3 platforms, and proves especially useful on Linux since the service doesn’t automatically start after reboot. (See this forum thread for ways to do that.) There’s also an animated splash screen during launch of Prism so you know it’s working on bringing-up the background process.
Icon menus - On the Mac dock icon and Windows tray icon, we now have right-click menu items to check for updates and shutdown the background service.
Windows minimize to tray - Clicking on the “X” now only minimizes prism window to tray. To quit prism, right click the tray icon and choose “Quit”.
This release makes Zimbra Desktop available to a quarter-billion Yahoo! users with support for 20+ languages. The default theme is a revamped Yahoo! skin to help keep the interface familiar as it spreads to those millions of users. Hope you enjoy, and as we advance upon a GA release: Thanks to the Zimbra Community for all your bug corrections and feature requests so far. The Mozilla team developed a few of these new Prism features from scratch just for us, you can read more about some of them here. But stay tuned, we’re gonna have a closer look under the hood to see how we implemented these features and the inner workings of Prism + Zimbra Desktop in a future blog post.
If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download it here for Mac, Windows, & Linux.
Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your feedback on it below or over in the Community Forums. A bunch of us are at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon this week - so drop in around booths 415 & 519 if you’re there.
The Merge of SaaS and Open Source
Posted on July 12, 2008
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Software as a Service (SaaS) is often seen as an alternative model to Open Source Software (OSS) for the delivery of next-generation software. However, we argue below that SaaS and OSS are independent and even complementary paradigms.
Nevertheless, with few exceptions (e.g., SugarCRM), software startups do not pursue both approaches because building out an open source community and data center/operations is beyond their reach. Prior to the merger with Yahoo!, Zimbra made our bet on open source, believing that OSS was the best means to innovate in messaging and collaboration software (without having to fund a large data center, operations team, and sales force). While I am confident that this was the right choice, ever since the initial launch of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, end-users have been asking us where they can get their Zimbra via SaaS rather than download, and we have been pointing them toward our many hosting partners.
On the other hand, most every SaaS offering (Microsoft Live the exception?) makes substantial use of OSS, and many contribute back to the open source projects they incorporate. But what most of them do not do is also open source the original code each develops for their SaaS product itself. Why should they? It is a substantial amount of additional work to launch an open source community. And the cynic would argue why give up proprietary intellectual property and lock-in unless your customers or competitive pressures are forcing you to do so? Indeed, the lock-in with SaaS may prove to be more onerous than it has been with proprietary software—not only is an organization tied to a proprietary software service, but its data is now resident in someone else’s data center. At the very least, your organization should ensure that any of your data stored remotely is fully accessible via web services, so you can preserve your options. Even then, migrating from one SaaS solution to another or from SaaS to traditional software is likely to prove at least as hard as switching between software stacks has been.
Which is why we see such a bright future for software that is delivered both in open source and via SaaS. Open source leads to better software, better through community innovation and hardening. And open source affords better long-term investment protection for both SaaS and “on premises” solutions. While SaaS allows organizations to ramp up new software with minimal investment, open source means they could always bring it in house later or move to an alternative provider (or at least have the negotiating leverage for doing the same). Consider many of the universities using Zimbra: universities often want the option of on-premises software for faculty and staff, but hosted software for students and alumni, all from one unified platform. The combination of open source and SaaS seems to be the one that best meets such customer needs.
Some of the SaaS vendors will argue that this is infeasible—that SaaS software is so different from “on-prem” software that the solutions must inherently be distinct. This is false. The overall Zimbra code base today delivers a unified user and administrator experience when scaling from a user’s desktop (Zimbra Desktop) to a single server for a SMB to the large multi-tenant, multi-data center farms of large service providers that support 10,000s of businesses or 10s of millions of consumers. The key is to design the software for SaaS from the inception and support on-prem as a special case—that is, to open source a software stack that is SaaS-ready. Zimbra has been delivered via SaaS since the very early days, the only distinction was that we did not build out the data centers but rather relied on our channel partners.
Of course, one of the major upsides for Zimbra in becoming part of Yahoo! last October is to leverage our new parent’s talent and resources to provide our own SaaS offering of Zimbra. The goal is to preserve all that users love about Zimbra—its community, its innovation, its extensibility, its partner/channel friendliness, and its long-term investment protection—but package it for the ease of adoption and low-cost of ownership of SaaS. Depending on your organization type, Yahoo! either has or will soon have a Zimbra SaaS package for you. At the same time, we are committed to continuing to work with our SaaS channel partners, many of whom offer Zimbra as a “white label” solution deployed from their data centers, and some of whom will actually be integrating Zimbra SaaS from Yahoo! within their own value-added SaaS offerings. Yahoo! is committed to this vision and ultimately sees the openness and extensibility of our infrastructure to be one of our chief competitive advantages—witness YUI, Hadoop, and Zimbra as well as OpenSocial, Open Search, OpenID, and so on.
So open source and SaaS are not contradictory, and end-users will ultimately be better off if they seek out software solutions that offer both!
Scott Dietzen is part of the Global Communications Products team at Yahoo! which spans Y!-Mail, Y!-Messenger, and Zimbra.
Zimbra Mobile for iPhone
Posted on July 11, 2008
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Now that the iPhone 2.0 software update is here, here’s a sneak peek of what Zimbra Mobile for iPhone looks like.
First, if you are new to Zimbra Mobile it’s part of Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition and provides over-the-air synchronization of emails, appointments and contacts between a user mailbox and their mobile device. “Push” technology can make sure that updates are delivered to mobile devices as they happen in user’s mailbox on the server. Zimbra Mobile supports a wide range of ActiveSync compatible devices, including Microsoft Window Mobile (PocketPCs and Smartphones), Treo Palm OS series, Nokia E series (and other devices running 3rd party clients like RoadSync). Now, the latest additions to our device list are iPhone and iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.0 software. We’ve been tuning and polishing Zimbra Mobile to be a great match for iPhone.
I know everyone has his or her own favorite email gadget but personally, I’m glad I have an iPhone. With iPhone’s large, bright touch screen, instant “push” delivery, HTML email display, support for all sorts of document/media attachments and meeting invitations plus a photo-enabled address book, what else can I wish for? And the best part is Zimbra Mobile for iPhone takes full advantage of all that!
OK enough words. Let’s see what it will look like in action.
Note: Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition 5.0.7 is required for iPhone sync support.
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You first setup how the iPhone will sync with a Zimbra Server at your company (or at your service provider): Once the connection is established iPhone will start to download your email, calendar and address book data. iPhone is actually powerful enough to download the different data categories in parallel. You’ll see emails start to show up in the Inbox at the same time contacts are added to the address book. I believe the parallel download is a unique feature that I haven’t seen on other devices. Also many other Zimbra Mobile devices typically only download partial envelope information and some text of each message, and get the rest of the message or attachments when the user asks for them. Given that iPhone has enough memory, it can download up to 200 most recent messages in full MIME format so that everything is available on the phone. |
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Rendering Messages on the iPhone iPhone can view or play many common attachments, including pictures (inline view), PDFs, various audio/video formats (great for receiving voicemail in your Zimbra mailbox), Word docs, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets. Here are some examples of messages. I really like how iPhone displays deeply nested replies.
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Appointments, Reminders and Calendar Of course Zimbra Mobile for iPhone is not just about email. As iPhone receives calendar events and meeting invitations from Zimbra server, it will alert users of incoming invitations, and allow users to accept or decline meetings from the device. Accepted meetings are added to the calendar, with alarms to go off at scheduled reminder time. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone supports all types of appointments, recurring events with all kinds of exceptions, as well as participants across multiple timezones.
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Address Book Got a big address book? No problem. One of our power users has 8000+ contacts in his address book. iPhone has enough memory to download and hold it all. Contacts with photos can be synced with the Zimbra address book as well, so go take some pictures of your friends with that iPhone camera.
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Initial Sync — Pretty Darn Fast
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Zimbra Mobile for iPhone is a new feature in Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition 5.0.7, and it requires the iPhone 2.0 software update from Apple. I’m really excited about the Zimbra Mobile for iPhone user experience. This is a great addition to our existing solutions for iPhone which includes ZCS optimized for the mobile Safari browser and our iSync Connector for the Apple Desktop. To find out more about Zimbra Mobile for iPhone, check out the Zimbra Mobile Forums.
JJ Zhuang is lead developer for Zimbra Mobile.
