November 9th, 2006
Zimbra demos offline client
Zimbra showed an offline AJAX client, which has the same look and feel as the online client. Mail, calendar, contacts, and documents are cached and then synched with the server when the user gets back online. "Technically the Zimbra Offline client is the same AJAX client UI, but now you are connecting to a local sync'd cache of the data and more importantly the ability to search, tag, organize, etc without network access," said Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj. In addition, Zimbra is selling its collaboration suite to hosting providers and white labelers, and introduced new skinning capability. "You can make it look like anything," Dharmaraj said as he showed Zimbra looking like Gmail. The offline synchronization capability will be available before the end of the year. In addition, Zimbra is planning to split out the mail, calendaring and wiki components of the suite so they can be sold as separate products, Dharmaraj said during a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
