Mulberry: The Underdog Wins

iCalendar (the standard .ics not the Apple program) only gets you so far. We’ve previously covered CalDav in Apple’s iCal for Mac, but where does the CalDav field stand for Windows and Linux users?

It’s important to push communication between different programs, platforms, and technologies. We’ve just completed a free-busy interop that we’ll blog more about that later, but you can checkout the forum announcement.   This week, Jong L. and John H. are at CalConnect Roundtable XII from June 2nd to 6th, 2008. Where they’re doing some heavy testing with other clients and servers to make sure that we’re compatible and standards-compliant.

A good consortium for that is CalConnect’s Interoperability Test Events (C.I.T.E.) the latest we attended during a previous Roundtable back in February. It included all sorts of IOP and Mobile IOP events, where interoperability testing between different calendaring and scheduling implementations were preformed. Organizations participating in the C.I.T.E. events were Apple, Microsoft, Zimbra (Yahoo!), Oracle, Sun, Kerio, Marware, Scalix, and Sony Ericsson.

While there’s plenty of CalDav compatible programs out there our server-team judges are firm: Pizazz and setup wizards won’t get you anywhere if you can’t correct that meeting time or properly notify others of the change.

If you want strict specification adherence in a cross-app & cross-platform thick-client: Our winner is Mulbery for Linux, Windows, & Mac. In addition to being a Swiss-army-knife of protocols, it’s also Open Source.

How to set it up? Checkout the wiki article CalDav and Mulberry – Zimbra :: Wiki or drop in over at the community forums for help.

Download and give it a try: http://www.mulberrymail.com/

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Leave us a message below if you got another contender you’d like us to put through its paces.

Browser War – Part 1: Firefox2 vs Firefox3RC1

As we’ve mentioned before it’s about time for another ‘clash of the titans’ in the never ending web browser wars. Raja Rao of our QA team had previously built a sweet AJAX client testing framework, so we decided to pit the major browser’s current releases and nightly builds verses one another. Who will go down in this first round?

Before you go “Wait, is this particular article just Firefox vs Firefox – aren’t newer versions expected to preform better anyways?” think of it as just a warm-up to instill confidence by beating personal records in preparation for some looming, ugly battle-royal. Plus the gym was destroyed last time we had them all in one place, and our graphs just get too cluttered, so you’ll have to come back for other matches like IE7 vs IE8b and Safari 3.1 vs Safari 3 nightly builds.

For Firefox memory bloat tests have been popular lately, but we wanted some real world JavaScript tests through a set of ZWC tasks on 5.0.6 – such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options.

 
FF3RC1 clearly won every test, so Mozilla deserves a pat on the back for advancing their browser. While completing little web-client actions there was often barely a difference. However, where heavy rendering had to be done the improvements were significant – in some places half the rendering time or even three times as fast!

What’s the test harness?   We used a customized OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time-taken rendering a page after clicking a particular button/link. Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. When we compare other browsers we will be using the same set of saved actions. Try it out yourself and discuss it in the forums – if you’d like some other testing ideas you might play with the other commonly used benchmarks like VeriTest & SunSpider.

 
So what has made Firefox 3 so speedy? Perhaps it’s the Profile-Guided Optimization (dual pass compiling) builds now being created that are greatly improving performance, or lots of combined JavaScript engine enhancements. Have you been comparing all the nightlies leading up to RC1 or noted the exact change that has enhanced it so much? Discuss it below and stay tuned, I hear Safari is pulling out all the stops – get your bets in now.

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Think working on complex AJAX apps is cool? Head over to the developer section in the community forums and see if you got what it takes. Who knows, you may just decide to come join us.
*As always performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors like account data and preferences.

CalDav & Leopard Goodness

For those of us who live and breath by our calendar, making sure that you always have access to it, is a must. Enter the CalDAV Protocol: A standardized way for different clients to access one calendar. Leopard’s (OS 10.5) iCal application has built in CalDav support, and it works great with Zimbra 5.0. Here’s a quick overview.

Vote: Webware 100 Awards

Times have been busy for us here @ Zimbra. We have been working to get some cool stuff into 5.0.3, and some other cool stuff that we’ll blog about later. In the mean time, Zimbra’s been nominated for the a Webware top 100 award.

Who do you think should win?
If you’re a Zimbra fan, show us you love us. Click to vote.:)

The Leader…Looking back at Zimbra in 2007

2007 was the best year for Zimbra yet. We thought we would take a moment to recap the great things that happened this year. Here are the events that were big milestones for us.

Why we switched to Jetty

One of the most important traits of Web 2.0 applications is low user-perceived latency in UI update, which usually requires low latency event notification from server to client. However due to the limitations of the HTTP protocol, a server cannot initiate communication with a client as events occur.

ZCS 4.5.10 Has Been Released

We’re happy to announce the availability of ZCS 4.5.10 for both Network Edition Customers and Open Source Edition users.

5.0 Coolness (Part 2)

As we get closer to the Release Candidate 2 of Zimbra, it’s time for another taste of what’s to come.

Zimbra 5.0 RC1, Zimbra Desktop 0.58, and New Hosted Demo Have Landed!

We’re happy to announce that today, Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 RC1 and Zimbra Desktop 0.58 are available now for download in both binary and source form under our new YPL license (FAQs). We’ve also gotten a ton of feedback from our users asking us for a hosted demo version of Zimbra 5.0.

Some Notes on Beta 3

We’ve been asked a few times, what’s new in Beta 3?