SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/ ), a leader in open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging, today announced the availability of a comprehensive group scheduling calendar, along with RSS and Atom support, online back-up and recovery utilities, hierarchical storage management, clustering for high availability, and more.

"Zimbra is one of the richest group calendaring applications to date, and the most powerful yet in open source," said Satish Dharmaraj, founder and CEO of Zimbra. "The shaping of our shared calendar was based on the needs of administrators. User feedback, along with feedback from our fantastic office manager, Janie, helped to shape the feature set. We talked through things admins liked on their current calendar, along with those that prompted hair-pulling. The result is a calendar which made Janie say, 'wow'."

The calendar functionality within the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), Beta 2, includes:

-- Group scheduling with free/busy; -- Ease of ability to share a calendar with a co-worker or the entire company; -- Simple creation of public calendars (i.e., marketing, events, company holidays); -- Ability to import an external calendar (i.e., foreign holidays, favorite sports team schedules, partner calendars); -- A multi-calendar view, which allows users to view all of the calendars to which they have access and overlay each calendar in a different color; -- The ability to import external calendars in ics format, or by using iCal; -- Delegated access (such as for executive admins); -- Time zones and recurrences; and -- Graphical layout and "drag and drop".

Beta 2 also marks the second major open source release of the ZCS, with updated support for AJAX mash-ups and:

-- The ability to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds; -- The ability to publish mailbox contents such as calendar, contacts and mail folders via RSS; -- A dashboard into anti-spam and anti-virus services; -- Advanced message tracing and troubleshooting capabilities; and -- Simplified distribution list and alias management, enabled through the use of an AJAX admin client to edit and create new e-mail alias and distribution lists.

"A great calendar is the defining characteristic of a collaboration solution and Zimbra has hit the mark with its shared and delegated calendar," said Dave Jenkins, CTO of Backcountry. "Additionally, the Network Edition provides us the support and administrative capabilities that Backcountry needs in order to move Zimbra into production."

The first public release of the ZCS Network Beta Edition offers a comprehensive messaging solution for administrators looking to migrate to a more modern, scalable architecture. Critical new features include:

-- Online back-up and smart recovery utilities which enable administrators to back up or recover a single mailbox or group of mailboxes without shutting down the mail server; -- Hierarchical storage management capabilities which allow administrators to designate messages to varying grades of storage; -- The ability to host and manage multiple domains on a single node; -- The power to search attachments, and to view attachments in HTML -- thus eliminating the need for all employees to have licensed office applications; and -- Server clustering abilities, which allow for automated fail-over in the event of a server crash.

"The growth and enthusiasm within the budding Zimbra community has exceeded our expectations," said Scott Dietzen, President CTO of Zimbra. "One of the most exciting things about open source is that it is the ultimate meritocracy -- technologists vote with their feet for whatever they find to be the coolest, the most innovative, or the most elegant technology -- and you don't really get to keep any secrets from them. They let you know what they think you did well, they are quick to tell you where you can do better, and they often directly chip in to benefit the project."

Availability

The 60-day trial version of the Network Beta 2 Edition and the updated Open Source Beta 2 Edition of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite are available for free download at http://www.zimbra.com/ . Users can discuss topics related to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and provide feedback at http://www.zimbra.com/forums .

About Zimbra:

Zimbra is committed to innovation in enterprise messaging and open source, and compatibility with an enterprise's existing messaging investments. Zimbra's flagship solution, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, was designed to improve the administrator experience by providing online backup and recovery, hierarchical storage management, and clustering, all as native capabilities of the system. Additionally, the company's flagship solution supports end-users with Windows, Linux and Apple PCs. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite also supports users with Outlook, providing an alternative user interface through an AJAX-based browser application. For more information, please visit http://www.zimbra.com/ .

CONTACT: Amy Swanson of OutCast Communications, +1-415-392-8282, or
aswanson@outcastpr.com, for Zimbra

Web site: http://www.zimbra.com/