Thursday, 2 October 2008

Zimbra Broadens Interoperability with Microsoft Exchange

Zimbra , a Yahoo company, and an open source software developer, announced the availability of a new open extension framework for Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that enables two-way interoperability with leading collaboration platforms.

The first extension, built by Zimbra for the Microsoft Exchange 2003 platform, and now in beta, allows Zimbra users to access and share two-way free/busy information, schedules and global address book with colleagues whose data resides on Microsoft Exchange.

The framework is also openly available for anyone in the Zimbra community to write an extension to other collaboration platforms such as IBM Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise, or PeopleCube Meeting Maker.

"Interoperability with Exchange and other leading collaboration systems is a top request by many enterprises and academic institutions where mixed deployments are common," said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo vice president.

ZCS Interoperability for Exchange is free for all ZCS Open Source and Network Edition users and the framework is available now for anyone to develop extensions to other leading platforms.