Every year, Macworld Expo brings together a loyal and diverse base of Mac users which also happens to make up a core set of Zimbra’s customers. Once again this year you’ll find us at the show. We’re setting up house with 01.com (one of our many partners) at booth 4328 – we hope you can stop by and find out how Zimbra works seamlessly with Apple products at home or on the go. And if you can’t make it, take a look at our 2008 recap of Mac-related news, or visit http://www.zimbra.com/apple/ for more information.

December
Inquisitor, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in the Web browser, was acquired by Yahoo! and launched for Safari 3 in May, and then for Firefox 2 and 3, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in October. Last month, in the Desktop Beta 5 release, we launched built-in Inquisitor support for the search bar - bringing Zimbra users access to Inquisitor’s fast, smart and flexible search experience.

October
In October, Zimbra and Yahoo! hosted the CalConnect Roundtable, a symposium on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies, including iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV(3) standards. The meeting allowed us to collaborate with some big corporations including Apple, Google, Kerio, Microsoft and Sun, as well as some major universities to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.

July
By mid-summer, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone arrived – bringing over-the-air synchronization to the native email, address book and calendar apps on any iPhone with 2.0 software and ZCS Network Edition with Zimbra Mobile enabled – just in time for loading up on the new iPhone 3G.

June
We’re always trying to find new ways to make the user experience faster, and this summer we put all the latest Web browsers to the test. We found Safari 3.3.1 to be the winner of the browser wars – an ideal companion to the Zimbra Web Client for the fastest collaboration experience yet.

February
In February, we launched a great improvement to Zimbra Collaboration Suite with our 5.0 release. In Zimbra’s traditionally inclusive style, we launched with support for Mac OS and for any mobile web browser, including the Apple iPhone. ZCS 5.0 also included the beta release of Zimbra Desktop, which gave all PC, Mac, and Linux machines the same rich Zimbra experience online and offline.

January
At MacWorld last year, we gave our Apple customers more to cheer about as we embraced support for Apple products and technologies, including Safari 3 and CalDAV for Mac OS X Leopard.

We look forward to 2009 and all the really cool stuff we are going to (very soon) launch.

It is a cliche by now. VoIP and other software-based technologies are bringing small companies capabilities and features previously available only to large businesses. Two examples of the trend are particularly noteworthy. One is premise and hosted IP PBX providers offering call center functionality on the cheap. The other is vendors such as SugarCRM Inc. offering CRM applications on demand.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls out a significant customer concern with SaaS: data lock-in. How can a SaaS customer get its data out of a failed SaaS system without undergoing the burden of escrow agreements? The answer is simple, but perhaps not palatable to SaaS vendors: open source a version of their software. SugarCRM does this, letting its customers run SugarCRM 'in the cloud' but giving them the code via an open-source license so that they can support their own deployment if necessary.

Real investment in open source software is still off the radar of many SMBs, and that is a pity, because cost-conscious midmarket companies can look to open source as an easy way to reduce IT costs: There are no licensing or upgrade costs, not to mention no initial software purchase. Companies can save money by switching their CRM platforms to SugarCRM, a Linux-based CRM application, from Salesforce.com. Even running a supported version of the software, which means paying support costs, is far less than the forced upgrades and licensing issues that can crop up with a vendor lock-in

InterContinental Hotels Group uses a variety of OSS products from Linux Red Hat, JBoss/Apache, and MySQL/PostgreSQL (in operating systems, servers, and databases, respectively), although not across the entire enterprise. In 2007 InterContinental adopted SugarCRM, an open-source customer relationship management application. Last year the company adopted Alfresco, an open-source enterprise-content-management system, in order to consolidate data about the group's 4,000 hotels. 'We could not be more pleased,' says Alex Grigorian, vice president of enterprise technology.

CRM Outsiders, Martin Schneider and Colin Beasty: This two-headed open source CRM monster of a blog is great for anyone thinking about buying any open source CRM product (they spend a lot of time talking about the value of the open source ethos). Of course, all things SugarCRM are discussed in detail as well. It is always fun to read Schneider thinking through an idea over the course of several posts plus, the blog now has a weekly audio feature, so you can put an aural voice with the written voice. A lot of fun and the best vendor-written CRM blog by a wide margin.

There has been quite a few good posts recently on trends and observations around open source. Here's my quick take on five trends that I expect will become more significant in 2009. The most fundamental trend is that open source continues to be more and more of the core fabric of IT, especially at the operating system, middleware, and database layers.

While it hass been established that there is a lot potential value in the integration of CRM applications with various social network platforms, the process by which that would have to be accomplished can be daunting. That is why it was only a matter of time before providers of CRM application providers started providing all the hooks needed to stream data from social network directly into the CRM application. Among the first providers of CRM application software to take this step is SugarCRM, which has added a series of connectors to social media sources that can be plugged into its open source CRM software.

SugarCRM has introduced connectors to draw account and lead information from third-party Web sites into the vendor's open-source customer relationship management software. The Cloud Connectors draw data from service providers' sites using Web services technology. Business-related sites currently supported include Hoovers, JigSaw, LinkedIn, CrunchBase, and ZoomInfo. Connectors for these vendors and others in the future can be downloaded through SugarCRM's marketplace for commercial extensions.

Open source CRM software provider SugarCRM is making it easier for users to get started, and succeed, with using their offering thanks to a new SugarCRM for Dummies reference guide available for purchase now. The new offering is a how-to guide for SugarCRM and helps readers to find out how to install, use and administer the application. Written by CRM expert Karen Fredricks, the new book is the latest how to book to be added to the For Dummies series published by John Wiley & Son

During a time in which employees need up-to-date information quickly and easily, companies are starting to look at incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into their repertoire. The problem, at times, has been integrating those capabilities to CRM systems. Looking to fill this need, Cupertino, Calif.-based open source software provider SugarCRM unveils Sugar 5.2, complete with cloud services and social feeds.

If you're a user of business software, chances are there is an open-source alternative to the expensive licenses pitched by big vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. We asked Bernard Golden, chief executive officer of Navica, a consulting firm that helps companies implement open-source software, to recommend some of the most popular alternatives to conventional software. Read on to see if there's an open-source solution that is right for you.

Chief among the changes are the integration links, or Cloud Connectors, SugarCRM built using Web services that connect and integrate third-party data sources, including Hoover's JigSaw and LinkedIn. The Cloud Connectors provide two main options, Schneider said: Cloud Views and Data Merge. The former provides users with a one-click preview of information retrieved from the data providers. Data merge then allows users to select the data from multiple providers and then merge that information into the data that is residing in SugarCRM.

SugarCRM announced a new Cloud Connectors program on Monday that opens the leading open-source CRM solution to cloud services like LinkedIn. SugarCRM also got a bit more social, with a new Social Feeds feature that provides alerts and status updates found in Web services like Facebook. It is a great way of opening up the SugarCRM system beyond mere source code. I find myself using LinkedIn, as well as SugarCRM, all the time in the context of my work managing U.S. and Latin America sales for Alfresco. Having both in the same place or, rather, having data from LinkedIn tied into my CRM system, makes a lot of sense and should help me to save time.

Commercial open-source CRM vendor SugarCRM said Monday it will give customers the ability to plug in feeds from third-party data sources like the business social-networking site LinkedIn. The new Cloud Connectors feature is part of the vendor's new SugarCRM 5.2 release, which will be available worldwide this month. While users could obviously tap such third-party services separately, SugarCRM created the new integration capability because it keeps users in a CRM context, as well as makes the process more convenient and efficient

SugarCRM announced the release of new Cloud Connectors for SugarCRM which allow for company and contact data residing in other cloud environments to be called and presented in SugarCRM, as well as Sugar Feeds which provide a rolling set of notices and alerts based on activity within SugarCRM. These features, as well as new management features for administering modules, will be generally available at the end of this month.

This version of Zimbra Desktop brings us close to a full suite of online & offline features, definitely try it out. Incase you’ve missed all the new stuff packed into previous editions, stop by the respective blog entries on Beta 4 & Beta 3. We are very excited to announce the arrival of sharing in Zimbra [...]

This version of Zimbra Desktop brings us close to a full suite of online & offline features, definitely try it out. Incase you’ve missed all the new stuff packed into previous editions, stop by the respective blog entries on Beta 4 & Beta 3.

We are very excited to announce the arrival of sharing in Zimbra Desktop for ZCS accounts!

• This is currently done by proxying, so no data of guest mailboxes are downloaded/cached offline to the local computer.
• Existing users may need to ‘trigger sync’. Simply edit the mountpoint online using the web-client (such as renaming it) to force availability in Zimbra Desktop. This is because mailbox sync is token based, and for data types newly introduced in desktop we don’t go back in time to acquire them. (Additionally, creating shares from the desktop client will be addressed with the ZCS 5.0.12 release.)
• Pushing change notifications to the UI when working with shared content is no small task, even for the ZCS server/client. The team managed to address delegate store/shared folder updates and even implemented cross-server notification support, eliminating the need for manual refreshes.

Of course the enhancements don’t stop there:

• Everyone raved about this in our Yahoo! Calendar Beta front-end, so it was time to bring the feature into play for Zimbra Desktop - introducing “Fisheye” view:






• Yahoo! & Google Calendar Sync - it’s all about CalDAV. (Give the new Yahoo! Calendar powered by Zimbra a spin.)

 

• Beta 4 added address book integration for Ymail accounts, and Beta 5 extends that to Gmail users. Enable in account setup; actual contacts vs auto added ‘emailed contacts’ distinction is underway.
• Built-in Inquisitor support for the web search bar - bringing you fast lookups, auto-complete, and search history. (If you are not familiar with Inquisitor, or want to add it to another browser, you can read about it here.) To change preference settings use shift+F6 to reveal the status bar, click on the gear in the lower right, then choose Tools > Add-ons, and go to the Extensions tab; you can even toggle the search engine used.
• Revamped import/export UI available in preferences for easier access - which helps you add iCalendars and contacts from comma-separated-value format. It even provides a quick backup using the previously covered tar formatter; that’s also useful for ZCS-to-ZCS migrations, as it contains both account info and items plus associated metadata.
  
  
• Streamlined layout for the account configuration menu.
• SSL enforcement - we now detect invalid/untrusted/mismatched certificates and prompt the user if they still wish to proceed.

Grab it via auto-update, build from source, or for those just discovering Zimbra Desktop for the first time: You can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.

Have an idea for extending Zimbra Desktop? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.

SugarCRM for Dummies was written by Karen Fredricks, a CRM expert who has written 10 Dummies titles, including books on Act! and Microsoft. Her latest provides a how-to guide for users of SugarCRM, including detailed explanations on installing, using and administering the application. The book is now available for purchase at Amazon.com, BN.com and book stores across the country.

Enter Jitterbit and Talend, two fresh starts in a land of stodgy giants. Jitterbit is the classic case of less is more: a lighter-weight and extensible point solution that can shortcut simple migration projects by weeks. If you are in need of a quick fix for a one-off data migration project - to quickly move from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM, for example - Its simple, menu-driven interface takes a lot of the tedium out of profiling application data.