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Collaboration always sounds so simple and the result of synchronistic collaboration is mighty powerful, yet harnessing its power through technology is often elusive. Zimbra Collaboration Suite, winner of a 2006 Intranet Journal Product of the Year Award, and its next generation messaging and collaboration system are out to transform this space.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite is an open source integrated mail, calendar, document, and VOIP system. Two key pillars to its approach are innovation and compatibility. John Robb, VP Marketing and Product Management at Zimbra, explained that their goal with innovation is to create new end user and administrator capabilities. Zimbra isn't seeking to emulate existing solutions but create a whole new experience for users. Their philosophy is rooted in compatibility with and extensibility of a company's existing technology investments. IT managers far and wide should be thrilled by these words.

Zimbra's technology consists of Java on the server side and a web client (browser). Ajax is at the heart of the product's power and its unique, open source Zimlet technology enables the integration of multiple internal and external systems to display 'mash up' results within email, calendars, and documents.

Zimbra practices what it preaches in that the Zimbra server reuses existing open source components to do its job. Incorporating components such as Postfix, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, AMaVIS, Open LDAP, and mySQL is what makes the collaboration server a complete solution.

Platform support is not an issue with Zimbra, as runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms and integrates with the native e-mail and calendaring applications and popular desktop applications (Outlook, Entourage, etc.) on those platforms. Zimbra also offers its own web client which can take the place of these applications. The benefits of the Zimbra web client are its speed of indexing and search and the ability to be free from reliance on desktop software.

If your teams are mobile, Zimbra Mobile offers "over the air" two-way synchronization with native clients. No additional software, servers, or services are required to integrate the collaboration suite with your existing mobile devices.

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Zimlets are what give Zimbra its compatibility and extensibility edge. These Zimlets enable users to access multiple systems (without opening multiple applications) in a context sensitive way and 'mash-up' this information within their email, calendar, or documents.

For example, you might have an e-mail message that contains several dates, a street address, and a purchase order number. Within that e-mail you can mouse over the date and your calendar will display in a hovering window; ; mouse over the street address and a Yahoo map will appear; point to the purchase order number and details from your purchasing system display.

What is happening in the background is the magic of AJAX. Every time you hover over a context sensitive link (such as the date in the example), the Zimbra server makes an XML call to a third party server (public or existing internal system) and the results are returned and displayed in a hovering window. Zimbra comes with a number of existing Zimlets and you can modify or create new ones for your internal systems.

Search and sharing is at the heart of the suite. It offers the power to search within e-mails, attachments, calendars, and shared documents. The ability to overlap, share, and import other people's calendars make scheduling a breeze. The documents feature is great for wide distribution of information and managing multiple revisions. Rich editing, permission setting, and the 'mash-up' capabilities extend the power of a basic document.

Zimbra offers administrators a strong GUI interface that uses AJAX. Administrators can manage multiple domains, multiple servers, global settings, Zimlets, user accounts, aliases, distribution lists, and monitor server statistics and performance from one place.

For a company that is only three years old it already boasts more than 6 million paid mailboxes and 1300 paid organizations. Customers come in all sizes, ranging from small/medium business, government, large universities, global enterprises, and service providers which offer Zimbra Collaboration Suite as a hosted service to consumers and businesses.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite comes in five flavors and pricing ranges from the free, Open Source Edition to $35/user per year for the Network Professional Edition. Details on the products and discount pricing tiers can be found on Zimbra's web site.

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