Wifi Revolution

Mobility is truly part of life, both at work and at home. For business travelers, who can ill afford to sacrifice productivity while commuting, the ability to access critical information while on the road is an essential part of daily life. Today, it is relatively easy to gain access to corporate networks via laptops while in hotel rooms and in airports. 

 

But while running—often literally—from one meeting to the next, it would often be useful to be able to access an updated calendar or contact to confirm an appointment or to inform someone of your delay. But who has time to boot the laptop and connect to the network — assuming you have a wireless connection in the first place? 

 

Zimbra (a developer of open-source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software) has the answer.

 

The company has taken its technology to the airwaves with the launch of Zimbra Mobile. Zimbra says its mobile product is the first integrated mobile offering for open source collaboration that includes support for a wide range of mobile devices, providing the capacity to synchronize desktop messaging, calendars, and address books with a wide range of mobile devices, including, phones, smart phones, and PDAs. 

 

Zimbra Mobile leverages native synchronization software on these devices, and dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of providing rich mobility to end-users.

 

“With Zimbra Mobile, we are expanding our commitment to ensure that users have access to their information on the road no matter if they are using a personal computer with a browser or a mobile phone,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO. 

 

Dharmaraj added: “AJAX and over the air mobile synchronization technologies give organizations and service providers the flexibility to provide anywhere, anytime access to critical information and resources to anyone.”

 

Zimbra is easy to install and does not require users to make costly or time-consuming infrastructural changes. Installing Zimbra can be as simple as downloading the software and installing it. There also are no additional licensing fees—just the annual per user fee. And the software does not need to be installed on each endpoint, as it leverages the phones’ existing calendaring and messaging capabilities.

 

Due to the popularity of Zimbra’s solution, it was expanded to accommodate requests to operate with a variety of mobile platforms. Currently, Zimbra Mobile is available for devices running Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile operating systems.

 

Support is included for devices from leading manufacturers, including Nokia (News - Alert), Motorola (News - Alert), Samsung, Palm, and others. Other devices, like RIM’s Blackberry, are supported through third-party partnerships. 

 

Zimbra has been designed to work with Windows, Linux, and Mac desktop operating systems. Additionally, Zimbra provides an AJAX browser-based client that delivers rich, secure, anytime access.

 

Zimbra Mobile can be added on to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), Network Edition Release 4.0, which starts at $25/mailbox per year for a minimum of 25 users and is available as a hosted or on-premises service. The ZCS 4.0 Open Source edition is free. The Standard Network Edition includes product support as well as software subscriptions to new releases, updates, and patches. Zimbra Mobile pricing starts at $500/year for up to 50 users.

 

“With Zimbra Mobile, I was able to get my Motorola Q syncing with Zimbra mail, calendar and contacts before I even left the cellular phone store,” said John Robb, Zimbra VP of Marketing and Product Management.  “I did not have to deal with the headaches of installing special software on my phone or licensing additional server software.”

 

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