I've just been catching up with a backlog of 350 odd Zimbra Bugzilla emails and it's made me reflect on progress since Zimbra was purchased by VMware some 18+ months ago...

We noticed that almost immediately VMware started hiring new engineering and QA resource and that development priorities seemed to change somewhat. Zimbra 7 was released with a lot of important features finalised and many bugs fixed - a 'consolidation' release perhaps? Since then, minor point releases seem to have been focused on fixes rather than new features. This means it's easier for service providers to deliver a reliable and predictable mail service for customers.

Although I can't give details, I know that there are some very exciting and innovative new features coming with Zimbra 8 and beyond. I came across http://www.vmwareoctopus.com/ by accident the other day and I'm wondering whether the Zimbra engineering team might be involved in that project. It would be a killer feature to augment Zimbra Briefcase - the self hosted 'Dropbox' we've all been waiting for?

Anyway, to the real point of my post - over the years, I have seen some fairly disgruntled, and sometimes quite aggressive, comments on Bugzilla directed at the Zimbra Engineering team about why this or that feature hasn't been developed and that requirements are being ignored etc etc... A small example to the contrary uncovered during my tidy up of old bugzilla mails - Zimbra stated that they would not be introducing Outlook Notes sync (http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10545#c11). This generated a fair number of comments, including from us and a partner of ours - the end result was a complete about turn by Zimbra and the feature was recently marked as fixed. I've seen other examples like this. I also occasionally talk with the Zimbra product management team and when they explain how much work some of the seemingly simple enhancement requests require, or what other RFEs are blocking things, or what new [commercially sensitive] feature they might be releasing soon which would make the much requested feature redundant, I realise that Zimbra do actually listen, and respond, to all feedback - it's just they can't always acknowledge it publicly and sometimes not for quite some time depending on where they are with their roadmap.

All in all, we may not always agree with Zimbra's development strategy, but I think we do get as close to the heart of the development team as I think it's reasonably possible given that Zimbra are in a very competitive commercial environment. Try getting as close to the MS Exchange team...