Remember Zimbra? The open source, email, calendar and collaboration software has had an interesting evolution from startup to its acquisition by Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and its later sale to current owner, VMware (NYSE: VMW) a little over a year ago. Zimbra 6, released in September, 2009, was the last major release of Zimbra.
The release of Zimbra 7 this week is the first under VMware’s ownership and leverages some of the technology the virtualization leader is best known for. For example, Zimbra 7 features VMware virtualization-related enhancements as well as enhanced delegation capabilities to control permissions and access as well as new policies for load balancing and automatic recovery of Zimbra servers.
“Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud,” said VMware vice president Brian Byun. “It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider.”
ServerWatch details other features in Zimbra 7 and comments by another open source player, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin.