News & Blog

The Announcement

We are happy to announce that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite v5.0.12 OSE (Open Source Edition) is now available for hosting.

Our qualified & certified vMachine is built with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support), and this is the configuration we recommend. We can also build it with other available, Zimbra-supported OSes, contact us for your individual needs.

It Looks Good

Zimbra has really matured in this version  – in addition to a polished, good-looking, intuitive interface, it features:

• Fully ajax webmail, snappy key responses
• Full IMAP and POP3 support, forwarding, aliases, vacation messages, client-style filtering & foldering, etc
• Excellent Spam filtering in this version (Much improved over previous versions)
• Full Outlook-style calendaring and notes / integrated PIM capability
• Integrated web-based documents – like GoogleDocs, but you control privacy / permisions (and no ads!)
• “Briefcase”-style file reconciliation and repository
• Zimlet extension framework, Optional Zimbra Desktop
• Fully themable – The “Lemongrass” theme is pictured here:

Zimbra 5.0.12 Screenshot

How We Did It

There were several Zimbra prerequisistes, in addition to our basic suite of vMachine standard packages, here is our basic Zimbra install:

# dont forget to set the locale and the timezome before doing apt-get
apt-get update
apt-get install perl libidn11 fetchmail libpcre3 libgmp3c2 libexpat1 libxml2 libstdc++5 openssl libltdl3 libmagic1 cron file

# zcs 5.012 ubu 804 lts 32-bit, extracted directly:
wget -O – http://h.yimg.com/lo/downloads/5.0.12_GA/zcs-5.0.12_GA_2789.UBUNTU8.20090126112326.tgz | tar zx

Then CD  into the directory and run the installer.

Note that some of the required programs and dependencies were not listed, and after a couple of false starts, we found some help here:

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/installation/8626-server-status-data-not-available.html

So we overcame these and other minor issues, and now:

It’s Certified, Getting Formal

We have Certified the combination as

• Fully bootable on a wide variety of VM and hardware platforms
• Expandable via added HDs
• VM-friendly, including JeOS modules and virtio
• Remote-Desktop / xrdp / VNC-friendly
• Web-Administrable
• Puppet-ready
• Self-signed certificate
• Script-deploy rating: 7 out of 10

Note that in the future, we are considering what categories we should use as categories for a formal Libre Certification program.  We welcome your thoughts and comments, please post them as comments to this post.

Example ideas:

• Bootable system-image DVD Backups available?
• Administrable via various vm-admin tools, OpenQRM? VirtualMin, etc?
• Usage / Bandwidth stats, RRDTool?
• NX/NoMachine-ready? Citrix?

We will be launching the “Libre-Certified” program as we finalize these and other details.  The program will also be available to 3rd parties (Both system and hosting providers), and add value to the community, and to FLOSS “Best-practices” configurations.

All Versions Available

This featured vMachine in this announcement is the Zimbra ZCS OSE (Open Source Edition) – because we believe in FLOSSing regularly (FLOSS: Free/Libre Open Source Software, although proper  dental maintenance practices are also of course important!).

For those who require the features found in the ZCS paid/Network Editions, (Exchange-interoperability, etc), we are an authorized Zimbra partner, and we are happy to host the Zimbra paid versions as well.

Contact us for details and how to get started.