AJAX-Tips
When Yahoo acquired Zimbra last December with the hefty price of $350 Million, people are left wondering if the program is really worth it. If you’re a university student, chances are you already heard of this tool. With the price tag of $350 Million, Yahoo has surely seen something in this program that other internet giants weren’t able to see. The changes in Yahoo may not reflect Zimbra just yet, but in time, and we might not realize it but we are already using one. As Yahoo is confident to spend this much money on Zimbra, it has to have something to offer to their present and coming customers. A press release was just published in behalf of Zimbra and Yahoo to tell their customers how widely popular is their upcoming system. Although it’s not as popular with regular consumers, Zimbra has cornered one market – the educational system. More than 200 internationally recognized schools are using this program. With that implementation is more than 600,000 mailboxes. That doesn’t even include the 30,000 mailboxes that are being implemented locally. Although the numbers is not in millions, the students as the tester of better technology, is clearly telling us something: Zimbra is not as popular as it is, but it can do more things that the regular outlook. And the administrators of some schools don’t even think twice of Zimbra’s greatness. “Like any large university, we have users operating on Macs, Windows PCs and Linux desktops. Zimbra is able to provide our 33,000 students, faculty, and staff with one consistent email and calendaring solution across all the different desktop environments,” according to the CIO of the University of Wisconsin, Bruce Maas. Zimbra is essentially an Ajax based program that’s presented as an outlook alternative. Instead of clinging to licensing of Outlook, Zimbra is a free program that’s open-source at the same time. Universities were able to move around freely in using this software. Aside from e-mail solutions, Zimbra was also seen as a good tool to be used for calendar reminders in the classroom setting. As it uses Ajax, the bandwidth requirement of Zimbra is lesser compared to other softwares. It was even made powerful as they are now represented by none other than Yahoo. According to Satish Dharmaraj Zimbra’s CEO “Educators historically have been at the leading edge of adoption of technologies that enhance communication, enable dialog, and promote collaboration among students and teachers. With our recent acquisition by Yahoo!, we now have the additional resources in place to double down in our efforts and continue to deliver the innovative features such as integrated archiving and discovery, mobile device synchronization, and broad platform support that have enabled us to outpace our key competitors." Since it’s an open source program, various developers has focused their skills in developing new products just for Zimbra. Called the “Zimblets,” it’s an add-on wherein everyone can easily implement in their program. Working just like Google Gears and Yahoo widgets, students can use Zimbra for their course and document management or even use Zimbra for social network sites. This could be widely implemented in Yahoo which will give Yahoo their needed boost.
