We have two exciting announcements about our Zimbra Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (ZCB)!

First, we just released ZCB 6.0. This new release works with Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0 and includes some cool enhancements:

• Better calendar synchronization
• Removes runtime dependency on Microsoft Outlook processes
• Improved performance and stability

But we didn’t stop there: Today we are also announcing plans for ZCB 6.5 Beta and are looking for Beta testers. ZCB 6.5 will add support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0. This is a terrific step forward for the Zimbra products and supports our commitment to providing ubiquitous access to messaging and collaboration data regardless of channel or device.

To learn more about ZCB 6.0 and download, click on the link below:

http://www.zimbra.com/products/blackberry-enterprise-server.html

http://www.zimbra.com/downloads

To join the ZCB 6.5 Beta Program:

Please send an email to beta@zimbra.com if you are interested in gaining early access to ZCB 6.5 Beta and trying BES 5.0 integration.

Thank you for your continued support!

In final installment of this series we recently had a chance to sit down with Frances Atkinson, the Director of Institutional & Academic Technologies, IT Services at Simon Fraser University, one of the over 500 educational organizations that have deployed the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Network Edition worldwide. Not too long ago, SFU decided to upgrade their collaboration system and investigated several options. No surprise, Zimbra won out! Now, two and a half years later, SFU is seeing how Zimbra is benefiting all of their campus systems.

Highlights from our discussion with Frances are below:

How are SFU’s staff, faculty, and students using Zimbra Collaboration Suite?

Zimbra has become more than just an email and calendaring solution at Simon Fraser – it has evolved into the campus communications “hub” used by all faculty, staff and students. With Zimbra, calendaring and document sharing are available to everyone for the first time, and fewer users are forwarding to external sites like Gmail. Additionally, SFU connected Zimbra to other campus systems increasing campus-wide organization and efficiency. Students and faculty also have the ability to access Zimbra via mobile devices, including BlackBerrys. This mobile access is even more important since we now have the ability to send out notifications to all users for emergencies, weather, downtime, etc.

 
How are you customizing Zimbra to meet the needs of the SFU student body?

SFU is taking advantage of Zimbra’s open source functionality by using several Zimlets – including Calendar Scheduler, Arcade, Google Translator and Yahoo Local – we are able to extend the product and bring features to people who may not have otherwise found these resources.

We have even generated Zimlets of our own. These SFU Zimlets offer students and faculty a simple way to access course information, alerts/tips & tricks and their mySFU profiles. The course resource Zimlet is definitely the most important Zimlet for the students. It allows them to pull up all their course information for the current, past and next term, including the course description, syllabus, video content and digitized lectures. It helps to keep students organized and on track to graduate. Faculty and staff also utilize Zimlets to reserve rooms and equipment.

Additionally, we have branded Zimbra as SFU Connect, and we got the community involved by holding a naming and logo contest. We’ve personalized SFU Connect by providing users with a tip/trick or message of the day upon startup to help them use the portal to its full capacity.

 
What are your students and/or faculty saying about Zimbra?

Zimbra satisfied the desire of the students and faculty to have access to a modern, feature-rich, communications environment. Not only is the email and calendaring solution functional and well-suited to serve the entire campus, but its open source nature is lauded by faculty and students alike. By choosing an open source product, SFU has the potential to integrate with other products as the University’s needs continue to evolve.

Telenet, one of the largest internet providers in Belgium, recently announced the rollout of a new webmail platform developed in collaboration with Zimbra. Since April 2010, Telenet has been providing access to the new system for over 1 million residential internet subscribers and will continue the migration through August 1st. The updated email suite – which is free to Telenet customers – provides 5 GB of storage, a built-in calendar and address book, many advanced tools like sharing, automated importing of external mail accounts, plus more features to come.

Previously, Telenet internet customers had a basic mail utility and minuscule quota space of 50 MB. The new interface, powered by Zimbra, is extremely user friendly and is supported by 100x more storage. Other improved features include the ability to set up rules for filtering incoming mail and access to a mobile browser version. Several factors, including lower disk costs and the broadening availability of both virtualization and cloud applications made it possible for Telenet to make this update available to its customers. (One such distributed object storage framework is from Bizanga/Scality, who developed a connector for Zimbra, and has a video on Telenet’s strategy here.)

According to Saskia Schatterman, Executive Vice President Residential Marketing, no less than 70% of their customers use Telenet email on a regular basis and just over half report that account is their primary address. Those customers can now send mail anywhere, from any device with Internet access; putting aside the need to also use alternatives like Hotmail or Gmail. With this cutting-edge webmail architecture, Telenet can provide all of their broadband customers with a sophisticated and full featured product, that’s still simple to use.
 
The rollout of the advanced Telenet email platform is phased, all existing internet customers will automatically be granted access to the new communication suite and will be notified once their mailbox has been transitioned. Brand-new users will receive access to the Zimbra webmail client by default.

With this integration Zimbra continues to deliver on its promise of providing hassle-free collaboration solutions to our partners around the world. We look forward to sharing news about additional international organizations in the coming months.

Lot of times you need to make a quick note about something in an email or a little reminder for yourself like “I need to confirm those dates” or “add John’s phone number” or “attach the PPT” etc.  But there is no easy way to capture that thought instantly.  Sticky Notes Zimlet helps solve that problem by allowing you to attach a note to a particular email.

The Sticky Notes Zimlet is really easy to use…all you do is make a quick note and attach it to your email. Once you attach your Sticky Note, it will automatically pop up the next time you re-open your email.

How to create your own Sticky Notes:

Simply select an email and click on the “StickyNotes” toolbar button or drag and drop your email onto the Zimlet to add your notes.

StickyNotes in Contacts (v1.6+):

Similar to emails, you can attach notes to Contacts as well. Simply select a Contact and press “StickyNotes” button.

StickyNotes in Calendar (v1.6+):

Similar to emails, you can attach notes to Appointments as well. Simply select a Contact and press “StickyNotes” button.

How to Enable the Sticky Notes Zimlet:

Click on “Sticky Notes” in the left overview pane and select the following:

a. Select “Add StickyNotes button to main toolbar” checkbox

b. Select “Enable Sticky Notes Zimlet” checkbox

How to Find Your Sticky Notes (via Tags):

After your enable the Sticky Notes Zimlet, a yellow-colored tag called “Emails with StickyNotes” is created. When you attach a StickyNote to your email message, your email or conversation will have a yellow tag. This yellow tag is removed when the Sticky Note is deleted.

How to Search for a Sticky Note (via Tags):

You can search and keep track of all of your Sticky Note emails by clicking on the tag or by searching for them in the main search bar.

Download:

You can download the Zimlet here:  http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/sticky-notes

Release Notes:

1. Version 1.6 now allows attaching StickyNotes for Contacts & Appoints as well

2. Version  1.5 adds scalability via CustomMetadata API. You can now add Sticky Notes to as many of your emails as you want.

2. Version 1.5+ is only compatible with ZCS 6.0.7+

Every day, when you first login, this Zimlet scans your calendar and sends out a summary email about the current day’s events.

This Zimlet helps both frequent and lite calendaring users in different ways:

1. For power-users, this is like having a personal assistant; who summarizes appointments for the day, providing a concrete idea as to how many meetings you have.
2. For general-users, the Zimlet helps in reminding you that there is a meeting to prepare for (in case you’ve forgotten)

To make it easier to read, the appointments are sorted and divided along two simple categories:  Those that need your immediate attention (e.g confirmed or new events) and others that don’t (those you’ve marked tentative, free, out-of-office, or declined but not yet deleted).

Download:

Available in our Zimbra Gallery over here

Rate & Review:

After you have used the Appointment Summary Zimlet, please come-back to share what you thought of it at our Gallery.

PS: This is one of our favorite recent Zimlets within the Zimbra team, and we hope you enjoy it too!

Email templates are extremely useful for Sales, Support and SE or any one who constantly sends out the same email on a regular basis. This Zimlet allows users to quickly insert any earlier emails as templates to New, Reply, Forwarded emails & also to Calendar-invites.

Setting up Templates

Step 1: Create Templates:
This Zimlet uses existing emails(nothing special) as templates.  Also, it brings the power of html editor for you to use & design. So, to create templates, simply send few emails yourself.

You can use generic names technique to replace common words. And just before inserting the template Zimlet will alert you to replace them.
For example: You could have hi ${firstName} in the body or in the subject

An example Template email:

Step 2: Setup a folder to keep all your Templates
1. After you have created few template emails, move all these emails to some central folder, say “Sales Templates”.
2. Set this folder as your templates repository by going to Preferences > “Set Templates Folder” button
3. Refresh browser

Using Templates

Step 1: Select a template from the menu:
With two clicks you can insert a Template of your choice. You can insert in three formats. 1. Just the body of the template, 2. both body & subject and 3. Body, Subject & Participants.

Step2: Replace Generic texts(if need be):

If you have any general texts in your templates, replace them with valid ones.

Resulting email

You can see that ${user}, ${firstName} & also attachments are inserted.

Other uses

1. Templates in Calendar:
You can use any of these templates in Calendar as well.  For example, you can create a template with Conference-call details. You don’t have to search for those details anymore, Isn’t that cool?

2. Sharing Templates with others in the team:
Simply share your templates folder and ask your team members to point the Zimlets to this shared folder.

Download

Please download the Zimlet from here:  http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/email-templates

Have you ever found yourself scrambling to find a WebEx meeting invite minutes before the meeting is set to begin? Or if you are scheduling a meeting, you are constantly switching between WebEx and your calendar to create the meeting & calendar invite?

Well, those days are gone with the new WebEx Zimlet. The WebEx Zimlet now brings the power of WebEx right into your Zimbra calendar. To see the WebEx Zimlet in action, checkout this video.

Or to experience first hand, download the WebEx Zimlet at the Zimbra Gallery at http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/webex.

Create WebEx meeting just like you would create a regular meeting.

Typically you would switch between Zimbra and WebEx to create a meeting. With the WebEx Zimlet, when creating your appointment in Zimbra, simply press the “Save as WebEx” button to create a WebEx meeting. The Zimlet automatically selects the configured WebEx account to be use (see below for information on multiple WebEx account setup), creates a WebEx meeting, inserts all the WebEx details (WebEx url, phone, passcode, etc) into the appointment body and saves the meeting.

Create a Quick meeting.

Allows users to quickly invite people and create a WebEx meeting.

Start or Join an existing meeting.

You do not have to scramble to find that WebEx invite or goto the WebEx site to find a meeting. You can view a list of meetings on your Webex Calendar and Start (as a host) or Join (as an attendee).

Manage multiple WebEx accounts.

You can store up to 5 WebEx accounts (with related conference calling information). This is especially useful if you are managing multiple shared calendars. For example, if you create a WebEx meeting in the CEO Calendar, the Zimlet will automatically uses CEO WebEx account information.

Full support for recurring meetings.

The WebEx Zimlet supports all of the WebEx recurring types and end-by patterns. Therefore, you can create virtually any kind of recurring meetings in Zimbra and the WebEx Zimlet creates an exact replica on WebEx.

Automatic time-zone configuration.

The WebEx Zimlet maps the 82 supported Zimbra time zones to the WebEx 61 time zones. This allows users to select a time zone and leave the setup of the WebEx meeting to the Zimlet.

Add meeting and tele-conference information to Subject/Location fields.

Lot of times its useful to just put the WebEx meeting and conference information in the location field itself. The WebEx Zimlet has a preference to select what you want to be appended and Zimlet automatically inserts the information.

As you can see, the WebEx Zimlet provides an awesome integration between Zimbra and WebEx. And will greatly simply your day-to-day online meetings.

Note: due to a technical difficulties, we apologize for the many updates and Tweets to this blog post.

Have you ever found yourself scrambling to find a WebEx meeting invite minutes before the meeting is set to begin? Or if you are scheduling a meeting, you have to switch between WebEx and your calendar to create the meeting and calendar invite.

Well, those days are gone with the new WebEx Zimlet. The WebEx Zimlet now brings the power of WebEx right into your Zimbra calendar. Using the WebEx Zimlet, you can:

Create WebEx meeting just like you would create a regular meeting.

Typically you would switch between Zimbra and WebEx to create a meeting. With the WebEx Zimlet, when creating your appointment in Zimbra, simply press the “Save as WebEx” button to create a WebEx meeting.  The Zimlet will automatically select the configured WebEx account to be use (see below for information on multiple WebEx account setup), creates a WebEx meeting, inserts all the WebEx details (WebEx url, phone, passcode, etc) into the appointment body and saves the meeting.

Create a Quick meeting.

Allows users to quickly invite people and create a WebEx meeting.

Start or Join an existing meeting.

You do not have to scramble to find that WebEx invite or goto the WebEx site to find a meeting. You can view a list of meetings on your Webex Calendar and Start (as host) or Join (as attendee).

Manage multiple WebEx accounts.

You can store up to 5 WebEx accounts (and related conference calling information). This is especially useful if you are managing multiple shared calendars. For example, if you create a WebEx meeting in the CEO Calendar the Zimlet will automatically uses CEO WebEx account information.

Full support for recurring meetings.

The WebEx Zimlet supports all of the WebEx recurring types and end-by patterns. Therefore, you can create virtually any kind of recurring meetings in Zimbra and the WebEx Zimlet creates an exact replica on WebEx.

Automatic time-zone configuration.

The WebEx Zimlet maps the 82 supported Zimbra time zones to the WebEx 61 time zones. This allows users to select a time zone and leave the setup of the WebEx meeting to the Zimlet.

Add meeting and tele-conference information to Subject/Location fields.

Lot of times its useful to just put the WebEx meeting and conference information in the location field itself. The WebEx Zimlet has a preference to select what you want to be appended and Zimlet automatically inserts the information.

The WebEx Zimlet is available at the Zimbra Gallery at http://gallery.zimbra.com/type/zimlet/webex

As you can see, the WebEx Zimlet provides an awesome integration between Zimbra and WebEx. And will greatly simply your day-to-day online meeting usage.

WebEx Zimlet