Zarafa SummerCamp 2011 kicks off

This year's two-day international Zarafa SummerCamp event was kicked off with an opening keynote by Zarafa co-founder Brian Joseph, who discussed how open source has helped the messaging and collaboration specialist expand with "user driven innovation". In the last twelve months, his company has more than doubled its number of partners, as well as the number of countries in which the platform is being used.

SummerCamp attendees enter the auditorium for the opening keynote. Joseph says that open source is "at the heart of Zarafa Components", and that the company benefits from open source in a number of ways; this includes easier development thanks to contributions from the community that help it to innovate and fix problems early on. Awareness has also improved in the open source space, added Joseph, with a larger number of Linux distributions, such as Fedora and OpenBSD, adopting and adding support for Zarafa and its components. He went on to note that the company will also ensure that it integrates into the leading cloud stacks, such as OpenStack.

Following Joseph, Steve Hardy, Zarafa's other co-founder, discussed what has happened in the Zarafa ecosystem since its 2010 event. The biggest news happened just a few days ago: the arrival of version 7.0 of the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP), a Linux-based groupware product which offers IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway, native MAPI integration with Outlook and its own WebAccess web client. The new version added a number of new features, including full support for UTF-8 (Unicode) and a new IMAP gateway.

Attendees work their way to the first of five tracks following the opening keynote. At the previous SummerCamp, the company presented a very early version of Zarafa WebApp (AGPLv3), its next generation web interface. Hardy says that Zarafa WebApp is being targeted to become the primary client, adding that it is a "major development focus". He expects a first alpha version to be available on the Zarafa Community Hub web site soon. API Documentation is available via the developer portal.

In addition to Zarafa Archiver (ZA), which just reached 1.0, new versions of Z-Push (AGPLv3), the company's open source push technology for mobile data synchronisation, and Z-Admin (AGPLv3), Zarafa's open source administration interface, are also expected to be shown off at SummerCamp 2011. A point update (1.1) and a major update (2.0) to Zarafa Archiver are expected during the next year.

The Zarafa 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 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.
• Zarafa SummerCamp 2011 programme published, a report from The H.

(crve)