Zarafa SummerCamp 2011: Z-Admin & Z-Push 2.0

On the first day of the 2011 SummerCamp event, messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa demonstrated Z-Admin, the company's next generation, open source administration interface. With the Z-Admin web application, system administrators will be able to set up, configure, monitor and maintain a Zarafa mail server all from within a modern browser.

Z-Admin: Zarafa's next-generation administration interface Once installed, administrators can also configure anti-virus and anti-spam solutions such as ClamAV or SpamAssassin, as well as manage Zarafa licences and create backups. Based on the yaffas (yet another framework for administrating servers) open source (AGPL) project, Z-Admin is still under development and is currently at version 1.0 Beta 1.

Like yaffas, Z-Admin is being developed by German company bitbon; Zarafa says that it will handle quality assurance and support once the final version is completed. The developers say that they expect to release a stable version 1.0 by the end of September 2011. Z-Admin and various modules will be hosted on the company's Community Hub at Community.Zarafa.com.

Z-Admin is based on the Yaffas open source project Today (1 July), Z-Push lead developer Sebastian Kummer detailed what's coming in version 2.0 of Z-Push, a major update to the company's open source (AGPLv3) push technology for mobile data synchronisation. Zarafa's implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol supports, for example, a number of Windows Mobile, iPhone, Sony Ericsson and Nokia mobile devices, and works with many PHP-based groupware packages. According to Kummer, there have been 50 per cent more downloads of Z-Push this year and more than 25,000 since SummerCamp 2011.

Compared to the current 1.5.x stable branch, version 2.0 will bring access to shared folders, full device resync from the server, improved device management and support for synchronisation of public folders (only some devices will support this). Other improvements include updates to policy management, which now includes password enforcement, the ability to set out-of-office messages directly from a user's mobile device and the ability to search, for example, for mail directly on the server.

Under the hood, it will improve loop detection and bring more flexible Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) access, as well as offer better logging (nine different log levels and the option to create separate log files per user). A stable 2.0 release of Z-Push is scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year – the latest stable version is 1.5.3, which is available for Fedora, Red Hat / CentOS and Debian (as D-Push).

Zarafa is best known for its Linux-based groupware product, the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP), which offers IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway, native MAPI integration with Outlook, and its own WebAccess web client. Visually, the WebAccess client is closely based on Outlook 2003 and offers almost all of the features found in Outlook Web Access. Like Z-Admin and Z-Push, the community edition of ZCP is licensed under the Affero GPLv3.

Zarafa's SummerCamp event is currently taking place in Kerkrade in The Netherlands at the Rolduc conference centre. This year's Zarafa SummerCamp sponsors include Red Hat, IBM, Univention and SUSE.

See also:

• Zarafa SummerCamp 2011 kicks off, a report from The H.
• Zarafa unveils version 7.0 of its collaboration platform, a report from The H.
• Zarafa announces new Community Hub and certification program, a report from The H.

(crve)