I just watched the on-line demo of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, an AJAX client that takes existing web-based mail, calendaring, and contact management applications to their next logical step.

The integration appears to be well thought out and not bolted on after the fact. And the feature set is impressive. I love the fact that it has a "conversation view" out of the box.

Anyway, check out the demo. I hope to see more and more of this stuff creeping into Yahoo! Mail and Gmail over time.

Posted by jzawodn at October 02, 2005 08:52 AM

Reader Comments
# ct said:

maybe we should just buy them. ;-)

on October 2, 2005 09:37 AM
# vanderwal said:

The calendar is rather good, much better than what is in the current Yahoo!, but having tagging in e-mail would be great as well. The quick views are fantastic and very smart.

on October 2, 2005 10:55 AM
# Rasmus said:

I have used the mail part of it. I actually like the new Yahoo WebMail better. The Yahoo one has tabs and feels faster and smoother. But they are actually very similar.

on October 2, 2005 12:31 PM
# dima said:

The interface is painfully slow. New Yahoo! mail is MUCH faster and elegant...

on October 2, 2005 08:09 PM
# Badrinath.V.S said:

Haven't seen the new yahoo! mail(ironically I cant see even the old yahoo, haven't been able to connect to mail.yahoo.com since morning), but from whatever I see in the demo, Zimbra seems to be way better than Gmail.

on October 2, 2005 10:31 PM
# Gregg P said:

I found the app to be very nice and wish them good luck. However, this "next" logical step was done quite a while ago in the form of Outlook Web Access. And as far as I know, the main function that makes AJAX possible - the JavaScript HTTP request object - was created by Microsoft specifically for OWA. There doesn't seem to be much innovation here.

on October 2, 2005 10:56 PM
# Doug said:

Mmm pretty spiffy. Wishing tonight that there was some way to configure time intervals of less than 15 minutes in the Yahoo Calendar... for certain time-sensitive, collaborative uses (like a broadcast clock), the option to either selectively use 1-minute intervals or bypass intervals by indicating the end time from drop-down of digits would really really help.

There actually is a lot going for Yahoo's apps as a suite but customizability is key.

on October 4, 2005 12:16 AM
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