Although I know I am not the first to blog about Zimbra , I have gotten to see Scott Dietzen, President and CTO work on
his demo over the past few months and it keeps getting better. Zimbra is a “collaboration suite,” think
Outlook, built with an Ajax front end and a service oriented architecture (SOA) for the back-end. Further,
the enterprise version has archiving and compliance built in, making
administration much easier for companies that this capability.
Zimbra embodies Web 2.0 in that it has a rich, browser based
UI, SOA, and can do mash-ups. Scroll
over an address in an email and a google map pops-up. Roll over a name and their contact info
appears. You can also subscribe to
public icalendars, such as the Boston Red Sox schedule, to overlay when
setting-up other appointments and trips.
Zimbra is a great demonstration of a rich web UI. But
even more interesting, Zimbra is an example of Web 2.0 pushing into the
enterprise, where most of the early web 2.0 innovation was in the consumer
space.
