By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com
October 28, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Open source messaging and collaboration software developer Zimbra (www.zimbra.com) has announced educational institutions will now have access to its Zimbra Collaboration Suite without having to manage on-premise software and hardware.
Bought by Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) in September 2007, Zimbra announced the release of Zimbra Hosting Tuesday, making it the only open-source collaboration suite that offers an on-site edition and a cloud hosted edition backed by Yahoo’s global cloud computing infrastructure, or even hosting through local partners.
Specifically tooled for educational institutions, Zimbra Hosted for Education lets students, faculty and alumni members create group scheduling calendars with RSS and Atom support, allowing schools to inform the community about campus sporting events, lectures or even class schedules. It also gives options for mobile access to a wide range of handsets including the iPhone, J2ME enabled devices and any mobile web browser.
“With over 30,000 students, faculty, and staff, not to mention thousands of alumni, we needed a collaboration system that would offer best-in-class email and calendar for our students and enterprise features for our faculty.” Kansas State University associate vice prost of IT James Lyall said in a statement. “We evaluated many collaboration systems, and found that there was nothing else on the market that could compare to Zimbra Hosted, which offers superb technology, and delivers different tiers of service for our different constituencies. Additionally, we can retain control over the system through flexible branding and privacy options, without worrying about installation, upgrades or maintenance.”
Taking advantage of cloud computing, Zimbra brings customers powerful access to its communication and collaboration tools without associated infrastructure costs and resources for technology management and administration, and 99.9 percent guaranteed uptime, 24/7 support and built-in disaster recovery features on Yahoo!’s worldwide infrastructure.
“More than 400 educational institutions are already using Zimbra’s collaboration and communications software, but our customers wanted more options and flexibility for delivery and management,” Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president Satish Dharmaraj said in a statement. “Zimbra is the partner of choice with the only open collaboration solution on the market that is built from the ground up to offer both on-site and hosted options. With the new Zimbra Hosted, we have removed the challenge of managing thousands of mailboxes and encouraged schools to rebrand Zimbra as their own, creating a communications portal that connects all key audiences.”
Zimbra Hosted for Education is available for students, faculty and alumni. There is currently a 60-day trial period for the software, after which organizations will be charged per mailbox and at a rate that varies for different product versions. Zimbra also mentioned it offers substantial discounts for the education market.
As educational institutions become an attractive and stable market, several companies have have recently tailored their products and services to the ivory tower, including email services provider AtMail (www.atmail.com) that supplies email services to Princeton and Duke, and security provider Mi5 Networks (www.mi5networks.com) that keeps Moravian College’s campus free of malware and botnets.
Earlier in October, load balancer and application delivery controller provider KEMP Technologies (www.kemptechnologies.com) announced its products have received passing grades from students and faculty when deployed in school environments from kindergarten to university.
