Zimbra's new Desktop: Look ma, no browser!
I fell in love with Zimbra's Ajax-style interface the first time I saw it.
Slick, powerful, and much more extensible than Microsoft Outlook ever dreamed of being. There was just one thing I hated about the Zimbra experience: the browser artifacts around the application that made me feel like I was stuck in a Web site, rather than living in an application that just happened to leverage the power of the Web.
No more. For the past few weeks I've been using Zimbra's new Prism-based Desktop. Verdict? It rocks. Take a look at the UI below:
Zimbra's new Desktop: It rocks
How did Zimbra do this? With Prism, which is a Mozilla project that basically lets applications borrow a tightly integrated, stripped-down version of the Firefox browser to run as standalone applications. This gives them all of the benefits of the browser (and the Web) without the browser artifacts. It's a match made in heaven.
Now that Zimbra has full BlackBerry support, plus the ability to use my POP3 (.Mac, Comcast) and IMAP (Gmail) e-mail with Zimbra desktop, I'm scrapping Microsoft Entourage to use Zimbra full time.
After all, Zimbra gives me the full calendar/e-mail/address book suite that kept me with Entourage, but bombards me with an Internet-full of add-on applications/mashups (flight status, maps, and a range of other Zimlets). In other words, I finally have the "fat client" that I craved while being able to tap into the "fatter client" called the Internet.
It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built...largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this--or should be.
we all know what big personal fan of Zimbra you are and I usually read right over it. I'll also not try to argue with the fact that Zimbra Desktop is indeed the most "loaded" of the browser-based collaboration clients - with all pros and cons that come with this positioning.
Now, on the main point of this post, however, I must say I am a bit flabbergasted by the buzz that's being generated around the new app-type user experience provided by Prism.
While I do appreciate the further refinement Mozilla is adding to the user experience, most of it has been there forever. When we launched the first version of our own AJAX client, Scalix Web Access, in late 2003, it already had it's own Main Window, no browser artifacts (menu bar, toolbar, etc, all gone) and, with it's multi-window capability, provided a rich application-like user experience. From early on, this worked in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based browsers, did not require any new and specific technology and has always been seen as a positive differentiator for our product. True, the login screen does have the browser frame, you have to enable pop-ups (as the main screen is obviously a separate that needs to be created by the login screen) and you don't get your desktop launch icon automatically (although you can easily create a custom bookmark-type browser icon), but in terms of application user experience, this has set the bar in direct comparisons ever since and many have commented that way.
Good to see that Zimbra have caught up on the issue, just not sure how hot the news are.....
Best,
Florian.
Remember Microsoft + Yahoo = Microsoft
Zimbra wouldn't be the first superior product that MS shelved in favor of it's own mediocre software.
Which leads me to this: I see at least half a dozen MUAs I'd rather use, but zero connect to an MS Exchange server natively, and zero connect using OWA or DAO unless the MS Exchange admins are kind enough to work with your requirements... and they are not, because you represent another client they may have to support.
So, in conclusion, nice toy, maybe good for a green field email solution, but absolutely no threat to established MS Exchange sites.
-R
As for Florian, yes, this functionality has been there for awhile in Mozilla, but how many applications do you know/use that deploy Prism/Prism-like interfaces? Not many.
First, a disclaimer. I work for Sun, and we're evaluating Zimbra. It's disappointing to see your "loyalties" bleeding through.
The fact is people like Zimbra. Much like Apple, they have vision, and you know that their product is going somewhere. Scalix? Word around the valley is that your CEO was shopping the company around and no one would buy, except Xandros.
As far as Zimbra catching up, I'm afraid that you are not looking at this issue correctly. Your client likes to hide the functions of the browser in order to appear as a client.
If your arguement is, "Look, we hide the buttons too", then you're not understanding what Zimbra or Prisim really is. Where's your offline client? Where's your drag and drop from the desktop (http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2007/12/one_of_the_coolest_things_ever.html/) They make cool stuff, which people like.
The point isn't multi-window, or who was able to hide the menu bar first. The point is that finally a product is good enough and has enough features to give consumers an open choice (which is the point of this blog).
This is a big boy fight, for power players. This isn't a fight between Scalix and Zimbra. This is a fight of features between Zimbra/Yahoo and Microsoft/IBM. I'm sure that the fact that you can hide a menubar is of no consequence to Zimbra or Microsoft.
I think in about 2 or 3 years, people will look at Zimbra as the little e-mail company that saved Yahoo.
Remo,
Zimbra isn't a clone. It's an alternative. They really need to work on this area more. People used to say Mac was no Alternative to windows. Now Mac is really taking a foot Hold. Same arguement was made about firefox in an IE establish market. A lot of people, including us, just aren't happy with Exchange.
I don't think this article is about Zimbra really. It's about options. It's great to have options.
-Chad
http://www.zimbra.com/forums/
Florian -
Glad to see you stopping by. Man o man do you have a thing or two to learn about your competition. err well I guess were not competing anymore since I've not seen a Scalix mention in the longest time here at Zimbra.
It would be wise of you to re-read Matt's article as you missed the BIGGEST point of Zimbra Desktop. While it's true we recently added Prism to let Zimbra Desktop run in it's own chrome-less window there is something you totally over looked. It's an OFFLINE client. That's right you sync your mail, calendar, tasks, and contacts from a Zimbra server and/or ANY IMAP or POP server. So you don't even need to be running the Zimbra server. You can connect to your Yahoo, Gmail, etc account and get a full online/offline client with all the Zimbra search technology and features our users have come to love. So this puts it in the league of Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook type desktop clients. Take a read of all the features it offers at the url below. You may learn something. Scalix doesn't have a browser based offline client.
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
In response to your point about Scalix having the early lead in launching a browser with no menus and chrome. Boring! This had nothing to do with Scalix innovation wise. This feature had been part of Oddpost from early 2002. Scalix just licensed that technology from Oddpost so please don't take claim to something that you or your company had no part in inventing.
Thanks again for stopping by!
- KevinH
Zimbra IS the choice for my organization. Is it glitch free, no, but after a couple of decades at doing mail, neither is MS's offering. I've admin'd Exchange, Notes and now Zimbra and it is head and shoulders above the others in most respects.
I work for a client that did replaced Exchange with Zimbra. It has proven extremely reliable, cheaper (about 66 - 70%), and pleasant for the user. We went from a clustered Exchange 07 environment supporting < 200 users to a 2 node Zimbra cluster supporting close to 2,000 active mailboxes. The Exchange server was horribly unreliable even after we brought in MS to "help" us deploy it in the first place. I know Exchange can do more than 200 mailboxes reliably, but Zimbra has proven itself as an industrial strength solution.
And our users don't miss Exchange and if they miss Outlook, we install the connector. Oh, and did I mention that it is saving us about 66-70% per year per user when you consider the end to end cost of operation. It may not enjoy the third party support of Exchange, but then it doesn't need it either because the large majority of Exchange's third party support is to correct things that MS didn't get right with the product release.
Would you like to debate AD as an enterprise directory service next, or should we talk about MIIS or whatever they call it now? But, I love my Xbox 360!
The browser/non-browser distinction is a silly one to draw, since in the main the non-browser approach to applications is to be preferred. During the day we all use IRC, IM, email, news readers, word processors, music players, and so on. And all of these have browser-based versions. But how often have you been in the middle of writing a document in Google Docs using a web browser, and then absent-mindedly clicked on File > Save in the browser menu? In other words, the browser chrome is not the most natural for the separate app--we like to have a clear delineation.
Or how many times have you been using Google Mail to write a post, and then realised that you needed to refer to another email...except you can't have two emails open at the same time, so you either close the email, or open YABT (Yet Another Browser Tab). (I don't know if Zimbra solves that one.)
And worse...how many times have you had a browser tab open for IM, another for document editing, another for writing an email, and another for reading your news reader, only for the browser to crash and you lose the lot. At one point I got so fed up with Firefox crashing when it got to a low memory situation (or having Flash running...I could never quite tell which one caused the problem), that in the end I was having to run Safari for half my windows, and Firefox for the other half, just to ensure I got through the day.
So the chrome question is not about browser/non-browser, but about drawing useful boundaries between our 'applications'; I can position my chat in the top right, I can write an email at the bottom left, and I can remember where these things are on my desktop, without having to step through 20 open tabs in the browser. (Even the fact that each application gets its own icon when doing application switching is a boon.)
So, surely I'm making the case for traditional, standalone, desktop applications? Actually, no.
The thing is that whilst I believe standalone applications are generally more useful and appropriate than browser-based ones, I also strongly believe that traditional ways of writing applications (C++, C#, Java, etc.) are too cumbersome and time-consuming for most of the applications we need to create today. A large class of applications are what I'd call 'internet-facing', which means that their raison d'etre is to talk to the cloud. So the best way to write these applications is with internet-facing tools and languages, such as HTML, XForms, SVG, SMIL, Ajax, HTTP, and so on.
Also, I believe that current applications are too isolated; it's still not possible to tell someone via IM where to meet later, and for a map to appear in their chat. At the moment all that goodness is preserved for the browser, but there is no reason we can't have these features in any application we are running.
And these two things are exactly what the open source project Sidewinder is trying to address:
http://www.swcube.com/
The idea of this framework is to make it easy to create windows (controlling their opacity/transparency/position/size/auto-hiding and so on), as well as to allow those windows to communicate with each other using a platform-independent events system. We're providing the glue, but what you put into each window is a normal HTML/XHTML web application.
For example, I can put Google Reader into a window that is docked to the top of the screen, and it slides off when it loses focus. Then when I click on a link to go and read the original story, I can trap that event, and create an additional window that is positioned on the bottom of the screen, of a fixed size, and which also slides off.
The key point is that we can--as Zimbra have done--write an application once, but then have it run both on the desktop and in the cloud. A good example is Facebook's iPhone application; it's very neat and works very smoothly, and because of its size, it would work very well as a desktop gadget, not just on the phone.
So we enabled that. All you need to do is give the iPhone app URL to Sidewinder, tell Sidewinder to position itself on the right edge of the desktop, tell it to slide off when not in use, and there you go...you have access to all your basic Facebook features, without needing to keep a browser window or tab open all day.
And the bonsu for the Facebook developers is that they have only had to develop one application! They wrote it once for the iPhone, but they got 'for free' a desktop gadget.
So despite what people say about 'just go full screen in the browser', or 'this or that application did it first', I think it's inevitable that the future will see a complete merger between applications that will run in the browser, and applications that will run as desktop applications, and this will be achieved with frameworks like Sidewinder, Prism, Air and Fluid.
Note by the way that the Sidewinder philosophy is different to all of the others I've mentioned, in that it has a pluggable rendering engine architecture. Sidewinder supports IE, Gecko and WebKit, to do the actual core rendering, since its goal is to provide flexibility in the framework, and leave the code display to plug-in components. Air on the other hand is geared torwards Flash (understandably, although HTML can be embedded in the Flash), Fluid is WebKit-based, and Prism is for Gecko.
Whatever you think of the different approaches, the future of desktop applications and web applications certainly looks very interesting!
Microsoft + Yahoo = Microshaftyoo.o
The search function does nothing either. I type in "Larry" have email selected as the target to search and click on search....nothing happens.
All that was in the first 15min I used it. I want something like Zimbra to be a serious alternative to Exchange, with client support for OS X and Linux....but I am not feeling it right now.
Microsoft owns email. I am very surprised how many universities use Exchange!! Office and Exchange keep so many people locked into Windows. Break that lock and MS will crumble.
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