Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop: Give Us All Your E-mail
"Zimbra is focused on creating communication and collaboration solutions that ease the pain points of traditional e-mail, and switching between multiple e-mail accounts is one of the communication headaches that users encounter on a daily basis," said Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and vice president of Zimbra, Sunnyvale, Calif., in a statement.
Zimbra Desktop provides offline e-mail via Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). The software also allows users to take calendars offline through the iCal standard created by Apple.
Zimbra Desktop also features mash-ups, called Zimlets, with other services, as well as e-mail search functionality and built-in organization features that include automatically converting e-mails into conversations and advanced tagging.
The software also features Zimbra Documents, a program that can be used to embed objects such as photos into documents and spreadsheets. It also can be used to create and edit documents and simple spreadsheets without having to switch between desktop programs or large e-mail attachments.
The Zimbra Briefcase feature uploads and stores e-mail attachments in a central location that can be accessed online or offline. A task management system is also included.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. acquired Zimbra in September 2007 for $350 million. At the time of the acquisition, Yahoo Co-founder Jerry Yang said he was impressed by Zimbra's "rich, AJAX-based e-mail, calendar, and contact management features and the company's "successful relationships with large ISPs."
Since the purchase, Zimbra has been hard at work. In January, the company expanded its support for Apple products and technologies, including Safari 3 and CalDAV for Mac OS X Leopard.
Zimbra's ZCS software was also launched for iPhone users via the Zimbra Mobile HTML client. The iPhone's Safari browser provides fast access to the AJAX interface, and the Zimbra Connector for Apple iSync enables users to sync e-mail, address books and calendars to iPhones.
Zimbra works with a variety of parnters, including VARs and hosting providers.