Zimbra Joins CalConnect

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimbra, the leader in open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software, today announced that it has joined The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org) and will now be supporting the CalDAV standard for calendaring and scheduling interoperability, further demonstrating the company's commitment to open standards. Zimbra's flagship product, Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), provides a unique set of end-user and administrator benefits that make it a flexible client/server messaging solution for deployments of all sizes. ZCS provides cross-platform support for Mac, Windows and Linux desktop clients; Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers; and a rich offline-capable client through Zimbra Desktop; giving users the most choice and flexibility for their communication needs.

"We have been following the progress of the CalDAV standard for sometime as it promises to allow our users to share calendaring information both within our internal system and with outside organizations with more ease and flexibility than ever before," said Greg DeYoung, Associate Director for Campus Infrastructure Technology at Eastern Illinois University. "We are excited to see Zimbra prioritize support for this new standard and it is yet another example of how Zimbra actively incorporates customer feedback into their product roadmap."

"Our customers use a variety of desktop clients, and being able to offer them a solution that allows them to more easily and flexibly share calendaring information between disparate systems would be an enormous benefit," said Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix, a Zimbra managed-hosting provider partner. "We are pleased to see Zimbra take a more active role in advancing the CalDAV standard, and look forward to rolling it out to our customer base."

"We are delighted that Zimbra has joined CalConnect," said Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. "Our mission is to promote interoperable Calendaring and Scheduling, and by joining Zimbra is not only demonstrating its commitment to calendaring interoperability and to the open standards which make it possible, but to working with other calendaring vendors and customers to develop and enhance those standards."

"Zimbra's number one priority is to offer a modern-day messaging and collaboration solution that anyone can use anywhere -- regardless of technology platform, desktop client, mobile client or Internet connectivity -- and CalConnect's mission to make calendaring and scheduling interoperability a reality neatly fits with this mission," said Scott Dietzen, president and chief technology officer for Zimbra. "Based on strong community demand, it's clear that the time has come for CalDAV to be adopted into the mainstream, and we are excited to work with CalConnect to make this happen."

Zimbra is currently working to support the CalDAV standard as part of ZCS, and welcomes the community to help test and provide feedback through the Zimbra Forums.

Pricing and Availability

The ZCS 4.5 Open Source Edition is free. The commercially supported ZCS Network Edition is available for a 60-day free trial on the Zimbra Website. ZCS 4.5 Network Edition is available at a significant educational discount by contacting sales@zimbra.com. The Network Edition includes product support as well as software subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. ZCS is available on-premise or as a hosted service; for information about Zimbra On- Demand or Zimbra's hosting partner program, please visit http://www.zimbra.com/partners/. Users can discuss topics related to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and provide feedback at http://www.zimbra.com/forums/.

About The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (http://www.calconnect.org)

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) is a partnership among vendors, developers, and customers to advance calendaring and scheduling standards and implementations. The mission is to provide mechanisms to allow calendaring and scheduling methodologies to interoperate, and to promote broad understanding of these methodologies so that calendaring and scheduling tools and applications can enter the mainstream of computing. The Consortium develops recommendations for improvement and extension of relevant standards, develops requirements and use cases for calendaring and scheduling specifications, conducts interoperability testing for calendaring and scheduling implementations, and promotes calendaring and scheduling. Organizational members are Apple, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke University, Eventful, Fresno State, Google, IBM, Jet Propulsion Lab, Kerio Technologies, Marware, MIT, Mozilla Foundation, New York University, Novell, Open Source Applications Foundation, Oracle, PeopleCube, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rockliffe, Scalix, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, Symbian, Synchronica, TimeBridge, Trumba, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Yahoo! Inc., Zimbra.

About Zimbra

Zimbra is the leading provider of open source collaboration and messaging software for enterprises, service providers, educational institutions, and government agencies. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite features an Ajax Administrative user interface and browser based client to dramatically improve the messaging and collaboration experience for administrators and end users alike. Zimbra supports Apple, Windows, and Linux desktops as well as today's most essential PC and mobile devices including the Blackberry, Treo and Motorola Q. Additionally, Zimbra supports popular server operating systems such as Mac, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora and more. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite was voted Best Enterprise Project in the inaugural 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, received a SIIA Codie award for Best Communication or Collaboration Solution and won InfoWorld's 2007 Application Innovator Technology of the Year Award. More information and software downloads are available at http://www.zimbra.com/.