Zimbra

Open-source email company Open-Xchange has raised a $9 million Series B round in a difficult financing environment, bringing its total funding to $17.8 million.

With this fresh infusion of cash Open-Xchange is expected to mount a more serious challenge to Microsoft's ubiquitous Exchange product. Open-Xchange claims 8.4 million paid mailboxes worldwide.

The real question for the company will be how to expand into enterprises. Most open-source software companies tend to infiltrate enterprises at the departmental level, proliferating from an initially small beachhead. Email, however, doesn't really work this way. Unlike an ECM or CRM system, it'… Read more

Yahoo on Tuesday released a hosted version of its Zimbra e-mail and calendar software for educational customers.

Zimbra is open-source software, which means anybody can install it for free, but Yahoo also offers Zimbra Hosted as a subscription for which customers pay. The education version has a "substantial discount" in pricing over the regular commercial version, Yahoo said.

Ordinary e-mail and calendar software such as Microsoft Outlook can be used to connect to Zimbra servers, but Yahoo also offers Web browser-based tools for using Zimbra.

One site using the hosted service is Kansas State University, with 30,000 … Read more

A little over a year ago Yahoo! acquired open-source messaging company Zimbra for $350 million, but it's only now starting to launch products based on Zimbra's technology. As All Things Digital reports, Yahoo! just updated its calendar service after nearly a decade, and is using Zimbra to power it:

The new Yahoo calendar is built on the Zimbra platform, which uses Ajax functionality in its online calendars and iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV3 standards. That makes it interoperable with other online calendar services, including those from Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Time Warner's AOL and Google.

It's great to … Read more

New security features planned for Zimbra will resolve an issue responsible for passwords being transmitted as clear when accessing Yahoo Mail, a Yahoo spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

"Plain text authentication is an industry-wide challenge that major e-mail clients and providers face when providing the right balance of backward compatibility and security," a Yahoo spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

"Zimbra has plans as part of the next beta release to implement additional new security features to provide more secure authentication options. This approach will be in place in the next few weeks well before we launch the … Read more

Yahoo's Zimbra software now can work hand-in-hand with other server software for e-mail, calendar, and contacts, including Microsoft's widely used Exchange.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite, an open-source software package, now has an "open extension framework," and the first extension works with Exchange 2003, Yahoo said Tuesday. The company is leaving it to others to develop extensions for other software, such as IBM's Lotus or Novell's GroupWise.

Integration with Microsoft's dominant Exchange is a major requirement for many companies. Yahoo got it working by using existing Microsoft Exchange APIs (application programming interfaces), said John Robb, … Read more

Zimbra just closed a deal with XMission, Utah's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, XMission will be moving customers who host e-mail with XMission to Zimbra.

It's not necessarily a huge deal, not like Comcast's decision to use Zimbra was. Even so, I like the deal because it demonstrates Zimbra's continued focus on ubiquity.

Zimbra's per-user pricing with ISPs isn't high. But that's the point. Zimbra has always focused on making it affordable for ISPs to seriously upgrade their e-mail offerings with its Web-based Microsoft Exchange replacement. Adoption first, and … Read more

I'm a huge fan of Zimbra's slick email alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, but I'll admit to being very impressed by Zarafa, a full Outlook/Exchange replacement with MAPI, Web access, iCal, and ActiveSync support. Zarafa recently became notable because the company open sourced its e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

I spent some time with the Zarafa demo and assuming it administers as nicely as it operates for the end-user, it's a winner. Is it better than Zimbra? After all, Zimbra also has iCal, Web access, ActiveSync, etc.

It's hard to say, given that … Read more

Zimbra, the open-source e-mail software that Yahoo acquired for $350 million last year, is officially coming to Ubuntu Linux.

Coinciding with this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Zimbra has announced a partnership with Ubuntu parent company Canonical.

Ubuntu users have been able to access Zimbra for the past year. But now, the e-mail software will be in the Ubuntu Partner Repository, providing easy access to both offline and online Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, and any IMAP or POP e-mail accounts. Zimbra also offers document and spreadsheet functions, as well as mashup features with services like Flickr, Amazon.… Read more

Yahoo announced today that it's letting Zimbra run amok, improving its Yahoo Mail with offline access. CNET's Stephen Shankland has a good review of how this impacts Yahoo Mail users, as well as some warts that remain.

It's a pretty significant move since it means that Zimbra is now reaching more than 250 million people, instead of the "mere" 11 million that it was touching before. That's even more than the number of people currently using Firefox. Next time your mom asks what open source is, you can tell her "Zimbra" or &… Read more