Using an analogy, if I were to claim that Exchange Server and Outlook client share more than 95% of the code between them, few people would believe me. In terms of their designated roles, the two products can’t be more different. So what is the desktop application, Zimbra Desktop? In short, Zimbra Desktop is a special build of ZCS that installs the ZCS Server and the Ajax client on the same user computer, collapsing the client and server tiers into one. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) has support for many clients, including a state-of-the-art Ajax Web client. It is a carrier grade email collaboration server running at many Fortune 500 companies, universities and large Internet Service Providers. The enterprise server in this case is Zimbra Collaboration Suite Server. We are developing two products, an enterprise server product and a desktop application, in lockstep in the same code base. However what makes Zimbra Desktop a unique case is the engineering approach. Of course Mozilla XUL based desktop applications like Thunderbird and Songbird have been around even longer. Both Microsoft and Adobe have been pushing for their brand of RIA (Rich Internet Application) platforms, namely Sliverlight and AIR, and I have seen quite a few desktop products built on one or the other. Using technology originally designed for the Web in desktop application development is not anything new, let alone unique. However for anyone who’s curious enough to take a peek under the hood, she will find Web oriented technology at every turn. Even though it’s designed to aggregate mail, calendar and address book data from many Web services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, it runs and interacts with user independent of any particular Web service. It installs and runs on a user’s computer. Zimbra Desktop behaves like a classic desktop application. I’d like to use this occasion to reflect back at an interesting approach that the Zimbra engineering team took in developing this product. Manage all your email accounts from your desktop and check your Yahoo! mail offline with Zimbra Desktop.With its 1.0 GA announcement this week, Zimbra Desktop is officially launched as an open source, full featured desktop mail client. ![]() But, maybe the greatest achievement of Zimbra Desktop has been to manage offline access to Yahoo! mail, for both paid and free accounts. It allows the user to configure POP accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and AOL, and in general, it's compatible with any other mail service that has POP/IMAP support. It can be used both as mail client and server, and it includes both calendar and organizer functions. Zimbra Desktop is a desktop email manager so complete that it is capable of being a direct rival to the products designed by Microsoft: Outlook and Exchange. ![]() After receiving many collaborations from other users and improving the application, the result was so good that in September 2007 it was bought by Yahoo!. Zimbra Desktop started as a project between three friends that thought up the idea of creating their own application: an email manager. With applications like Zimbra Desktop, that receives its name thanks to a song by Talking Heads, we can verify the grandeur of free software, that is capable of managing that with the joint effort of anonymous people we can enjoy great quality free applications.
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