Zimbra Desktop 2.0 Furthers VMware's Email Push

VMware’s push into the corporate email market continues. The latest move involves Zimbra Desktop 2.0. Jim Morrisroe, VP at Zimbra, briefed me about the new release and potential channel partner opportunities. Here’s the  scoop.

As you’ll recall, VMware acquired Zimbra — an open source email platform — from Yahoo earlier this year. VMware’s goal is to promote Zimbra to its channel partners, while countering Microsoft Exchange within business settings.

Zimbra, as always, is a cross platform experience, with a web client, and mobile clients for enhanced portability and accessibility. Zimbra Desktop 2.0 brings with it a new ability for end-users to deploy their own open plug-ins called “zimlets.” With that comes the ability for Facebook, Webex, Salesforce and other service integration. It eases up IT administration, since zimlets traditionally were a server-side feature. OAuth for single-sign on is also enabled, along with cloud backup.

Zimbra’s also introducing aggregation for Twitter, Facebook and Google Apps, looking to push the social, work and e-mail functional all into one friendly location.

Jim Morrisroe detailed some more:

He says drag-and-drop functionality, along with hover-over pop-up context has been made smart. The example given was that hovering over a contact’s e-mail will also display their phone number, or any other relevant info to the contact.

And what about the channel? Morrisroe noted that…

I asked Morrisroe if he could give me three quick bullet points about Zimbra Desktop 2.0. He quipped, “Maturity, openness, aggregation.”

Talk about getting to the point.

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