Zimbra, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server that was acquired by Yahoo this past September, has released version 5.0 of its collaboration suite. The upgrades are various and wide-reaching, with support finally here for the BlackBerry and several improvements made to Zimbra’s browser-based email client.

In addition to managing their email, calendars and contacts, customers can now use Zimbra’s browser-based client to instant message, collaborate on documents via wiki, and share files. Yahoo search functionality, and local search in particular, has been integrated into the browser-based client as well, enabling users to search Yahoo Maps from within their email interface.

Zimbra’s desktop client, which was soft launched last March and emulates much of the browser-based client, now supports non-Zimbra email accounts (like Yahoo Mail and Gmail, or any POP/IMAP account). However, desktop support for instant messaging, document collaboration, and file sharing has yet to be added.

While versions of Zimbra have existed for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, iPhone and other mobile devices, only now has Zimbra released a version of its server that can work with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and, therefore, BlackBerry devices. Zimbra is only the fourth company, behind Microsoft, Novell, and IBM, to develop compatibility with the BlackBerry server, and the only one to do it without direct assistance from RIM, producer of the BlackBerry. John Robb of Zimbra says that BlackBerry support required a lot of development so that the Zimbra server could emulate Exchange Server and communicate with the BlackBerry server.

Zimbra has passed the 20,000 customers and 11M+ mailboxes marks. Companies can choose to run Zimbra by installing the company’s server package locally or paying a third party to host the software remotely. While Robb says that Zimbra is not focused on providing any hosted solutions soon, it is something that they plan to do in the longer term.

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Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed.

Our coverage of Zimbra goes back to 2005. They gained wide exposure at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality.

The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.

This was a very, very smart acquisition. In one quick move Yahoo is now in the race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite. I would not be surprised to see them pick up Zoho next. That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.

Update: Here is the Yahoo press release and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’sblog post on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post.

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Comcast is ditching its antiquidated webmail software and replacing it with Zimbra’s Ajax office suite, the companies will announce this evening. That’s good news for Comcast’s twelve million broadband customers, and even better news for Zimbra - this deal will significantly grow the number of Zimbra users from the current six million or so customers.

The deal also includes new functionality, including giving Comcast triple play customers (VOIP phone, Internet, Cable TV) the ability to listen to voicemails online and forward via email. Users will also be able to manage instant messaging from the Zimbra client, and the companies are adding Plaxo’s address book functionality into the mix.

Zimbra recently released new software that lets customers access their webmail offline. The company offers its basic service for free via an open-source download. They charge for customer service and also distribute their premium version through resellers. They’ve raised just over $30 million in venture capital.

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Zimbra will announce a new offline client application, Zimbra Desktop, later this week. It will allow Zimbra users to access and use Zimbra’s email and other office applications, in the browser, when offline.

I spoke withZimbra Co-Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj about the history of the company and the new Zimbra Desktop product this morning. Listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch.

Offline access to web applications (and just as importantly, web-based data) is an area getting a lot of attention right now. Firefox has announced that Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. New startups like Scrybe are experimenting with this offline syncing. Adobe (and competitors) has just released it’s Apollo platform, which lets developers run HTML, javascript and Flash code outside of the browser and when offline.

Most of these products are still being developed (Firefox 3) or have just launched early or private beta versions (Apollo, Scrybe). Zimbra has written its own code to handle offline functionality, and the user experience will be identical whether users are online or offline: open Zimbra in the browser and use the application.

Zimbra Desktop will be available cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and cross browser (Firefox, IE, Safari). The Zimbra web application and all user data is stored on the client computer (the database is Apache Derby). Data is synced real time when in online mode.

Zimbra Desktop does not include drag and drop functionality into the browser (for, say, dragging an attachment into an email), although the company says it will be included in a future release.

All Zimbra source code, including Zimbra Desktop, is open source - I expect other web developers to be taking a close look at how they are architecting things.

Zimbra recenty announced that they reached 6 million paying customers. The company is based in San Francisco, with a ten person office in India. They’ve raised $30.5 million over three rounds of financing, and say they will most likely not need to raise more capital.

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We first covered Zimbra back in September 2005. Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts).

Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” In October 2006. Next Monday they will announce that they now have more than 6 million paid mailboxes over 1,300 customers, a growth of 50% in three months. Sixty percent of their customers are being serviced through resellers.

They have lots of help with the product, too. They’ll be announcing version 4.5 of their Collaboration Suite (which is already available). 6,300 developers and administrators have contributed to Zimbra. The open source version of Zimbra has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of times.

The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich.

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What do Digg, Mozilla, the University of Bern Switzerland and the Times of India have in common? According to an announcement today, they are all among the 1000+ customers of web based open source communication and collaboration suite Zimbra.

Founded in 2003 in San Mateo, California the company today announced that it has passed four million paid hosted and on-site mailboxes. That’s a small but growing and very significant number compared to the 150 million plus seats sold by Microsoft Exchange. Zimbra took $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.

We’ve profiled the moves toward a web based office by Google, Zoho, Microsoft and countless small startups. Zimbra includes a long list of features that other companies are just beginning to offer. Microsoft says that Exchange Server 2007 is due out at the end of this year or early next year; if it does in fact become available as a final release in that time frame it will be interesting to see if it can do what Zimbra can do.

The webmail client looks and acts a lot like GMail but supports email, calendar and contacts from Outlook.
There’s RSS feed reading, Salesforce integration, mobile access without download of a separate client (no Windows mobile support though apparently), tagging, document and spreadsheet sharing and collaboration and Ajax embeding of rich documents inside one another. Zimbra has explicit support for mashups and the kinds of voice integration that Microsoft products require third party tools to perform.

It’s an impressive offering that’s obviously growing in adoption. If you’re looking for evidence supporting the viability of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Zimbra’s customer announcement today makes for quality fodder.

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The Web 2.0 conference kicked off today with a number of great workshops. The highlights for us were the Attention Trust board meeting (posts below) and, of course, the Launchpad workshop where a dozen companies presented in an hour and a half.

My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling - searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both - a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.

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Company: Zimbra
Founded: 2003
Location: San Mateo, CA

We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.

When you first view the Zimbra demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is a web based version of Word.

At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.

There are some core differences between how Zimbra and Writely approach their respective markets, however. Writely is a proprietary, hosted application (although they import and export in Word and other formats). Zimbra is an open source project, and is presented only in demo form at this point - if you want to run it you have to do so on your own servers.

So while Zimbra is not something you can immediately start using, you can view a hosted demo here and a flash demo here. The source code is available on the download page here.

Zimbra also integrates tagging of messages. It’s very impressive and quite beautiful.

Additional Reading

Solution Watch (thank for the tip, Brian), Ajaxian, batalion, Digital Hobo, Deep’s Home, Alice Hill,

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