In-Tuition Networks

The news has finally broken - VMWare have confirmed the rumours and announced that they have reached a definitive agreement with Yahoo! Inc to purchase Zimbra.  Zimbra.com has more on this announcement.

Whilst we have not known the identity of the purchaser, we have known for some time that a sale had been imminent and have been working with senior Zimbra colleagues to understand what a change of ownership would mean to Zimbra partners and customers.  All I can say at this stage is that without doubt, Zimbra are extremely positive about prospects and are very committed to product development and the current partner strategy.  Remember, these are the same Zimbra staff who went through the last buyout back in Jan 2007 (Jan seems like the month to sell Zimbra ;-)) - everything they told me then turned out to be correct.  Most of the original senior executive team and product developers have stayed the same since before Yahoo! and all are still very committed to their original mission to build better email - I have every reason to believe that the VMWare purchase will only help further their mission.

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The ability to custom brand Zimbra Webmail with a unique host name, Webmail login banner, logo and logo URL is now live and generally available for all Resellers for no additional charge. To enable the branding, Resellers should access the 'Branding' page in the My Accounts section of the Reseller Centre.

The Reseller Zimbra Branding system provides the following features:

• Ability to advertise a custom host name for Zimbra services - this is known as the Public Service Host Name.
• Resellers and their customers can access Zimbra services using e.g. email.resellers-domain.com.
• Public Service Host Name can be used for: Webmail, Zimbra Admin, IMAP/POP3, Zimbra Mobile.
• Upload custom login banner for Webmail.
• Upload custom logo for Webmail.
• Define Webmail logo URL (for linking back to Resellers' main website/support site).
• Propagates to all, or selected domains.
  
• Supports domain level branding to allow for different branding per domain if required - e.g. for customers who want their own logo in the Webmail.
  

The Reseller Zimbra Branding features are available to all resellers without additional charge.

Known limitations

1. External IM clients can not use the Public Service Host Name as the XMPP server name - instead users must configure the actual name of the mailbox server.
2. Logins via SSL should be redirected over a generic SSL enabled domain, however there is a bug in Zimbra so this does not yet happen. A forthcoming Zimbra update will fix this issue.
3. Using the Public Service Host Name with SSL will result in a certificate mismatch error. There is no easy work around for this as Zimbra does not support multiple SSL certificates. We can, however, provide reseller specific SSL certificates and dedicated IP addresses hosted on our Zimbra Proxy cluster as a chargeable extra service if this level of branding support is required.
4. Zimbra favicon, the word Zimbra and various other such areas where 'Zimbra' is visible exist, although it is expected that these will be fixed in due course.
   

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Zimbra Desktop, Zimbra's offline capable webmail client, normally runs in its own stand alone window as a separate application, however there are a few things I find frustrating about this requirement, namely:

• I do most of my work in Firefox - I want Zimbra desktop open in a tab so that I can access it within Firefox.
• I'd like to have multiple views on my mailbox - i.e. I often refer to other emails whilst I'm drafting a new one and with a single window instance, it's a pain to switch between both emails as it requires that I save the email I'm working on to Drafts before navigating to the reference email. With Zimbra desktop running in multiple tabs, I'd be able to switch between drafting and my inbox very easily.

Well it turns out all of this and more is possible... Zimbra Desktop is really just a GUI which connects to a web server running on your local machine, therefore all we need is the URL of your mailbox and we're away.

Zimbra Desktop uses a personalised URL and you'll need to open the file <install>/zdesktop.webapp/webapp.ini with a text editor and find the "uri" key, and the value after "uri=" is the URL, which will look something like this:

http://localhost:7633/desktop/login.jsp?at=7e58c54e-60f2-4d90-878f-j2kdnm21345

Now all we need to do is copy this to a tab in Firefox and we're away - I've got my first two Firefox tabs set to view my email, whilst tab three displays my calendar.

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The Register is reporting that Gmail has suffered a couple of hours email outage today. Nothing unusual - it has happened before, however it brings to mind various questions about whether one should be running one's mission critical email on a mass market focused platform.

Our Resellers sometimes ask us how our Zimbra Hosted service and our Zimbra On-Site solutions compare against Google's Gmail - usually because they're trying to help a potential customer understand why they should invest in a sensible email solution.  On the face of it, Google has a a reasonably compelling offer, especially with all that "free" storage space, but look a little more closely and it becomes clear that a proper business should think carefully about where they host their valuable email and collaboration data.  There's the privacy concerns, advertising, the fact that the service is still in Beta some 5 years after it launched (surely you aren't seriously thinking about running your business on beta software?), disappearing emails, missing emails (see here and here) and numerous other issues... A key question for any one responsible for their organisation's IT has got to be: "who do I call when it goes wrong and the board are on my back - can I speak to the MD of Google and have a discussion about what he's going to do about restoring service or finding my missing email?". Highly unlikely that you'll get to speak to anyone at all, let alone management - because that's not their business model. They are focused on gaining a ton of users so that they can compete with Hotmail and Yahoo who each have something like 270 million mailboxes - it's mass market stuff all the way. In any case, the SLA certainly isn't going to satisfy the board.

Clearly, it's unrealistic to expect IT systems to be totally infallible, and for such a large service, Google seem to be doing a reasonable job, but it's essential that businesses remain firmly in the driving seat when it comes to what happens to their mission critical services and their data.

So back to how does "Zimbra stack up compared with Google" - setting aside technical comparisions, in which Zimbra kills it as far as I'm concerned, I don't see they're even in the same ball park - Zimbra is a business focused, email collaboration and groupware platform which can be hosted in the cloud or on premises. Zimbra's revenue model is based on license sales - not advertising. Google is an email solution aimed at consumers and is designed to further Google's core revenue interests...

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I'm pleased to announce that our Zimbra service now supports multiple SSL
certificates for all protocols (except SMTP - coming soon!). This is
something that cannot be done with a standard Zimbra installation.
 
For our resellers who currently have their own SSL certificate installed
for the Zimbra UI, we've added POP3S and IMAPS support using the same
certificate and hostname.
 
For those interested in the technical side of how this was accomplished;
we've modified our frontend lvs cluster servers with Zimbra versions of
nginx, set to use additional nginx config files for each reseller. Nginx
talks to our Zimbra servers so that it can direct any incoming connection
to the correct backend Zimbra server hosting the mailbox being requested.
These lookups are cached using the supplied memcache.

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Although Zimbra's Product Management portal has been showing the dates for some time they have been subject to change (and of course may still do) but last week's announcement is very encouraging and it appears we can look forward to the first beta some time around end of March. In-Tuition's resellers will be pleased to see that a single domain administrator mailbox will be able to manage multiple domains and that we should be able to delegate finer grained control for administrator mailboxes. We'll be installing Beta 1 on our test email infrastructure as it becomes available and will make test mailbox accounts available as soon as possible.

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I am very much looking forward to contributing to the success of In-Tuition Networks.  The Hosted Zimbra product is a fantastic Microsoft Exchange replacement – in the current market climate IT budgets are forecast to be slashed, so a product which can offer tangible savings with no loss of functionality has to be a winner.  I am also optimistic about the In-Tuition e-mail continuity portfolio – e-mail is now critical to most businesses so a contingency plan is essential and we are well positioned to be that contingency.

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I am pleased to announce that we have appointed Karl Robinson as Sales Director of In-Tuition Networks Limited with immediate effect.

Karl brings with him a wealth of experience gained during a 12 year career in IT Sales - a career which saw him hold senior positions at Kingston Communications, Mistral Internet and PSINet. Prior to joining In-Tuition, Karl was Managing Director of Mistral Internet Group Limited, a UK business Internet Service Provider where he lead the growth of the business from £2m to £25m in a 7 year period.

We are all extremely excited about Karl joining the team at In-Tuition Networks. Now that we've fine tuned and honed our Zimbra email hosting platform and are well on our way to getting our Reseller Control panel full featured, we are ready to kick start our sales plan. I'm sure that Karl's experience and enthusiasm will help drive the business forward to achieving our goal of becoming Europe’s number one supplier of wholesale hosted e-mail services.

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