Zimbra Brings Collaboration Suite to the Clouds for Education Institutions
Zimbra has launched a new edition of its Zimbra Collaboration Suite specifically for education institutions, a completely cloud-based solution called Zimbra Hosted for Education.
According to Zimbra, which is owned by Yahoo, its Collaboration Suite is already in use by about 500 academic institutions, and this new Zimbra Hosted for Education option is designed to provide greater flexibility for those institutions in how they deploy the suite of communications, productivity, and collaboration tools. (The on-premises option is still available, as is the option to have Zimbra hosted by a third-party provider.)
Some of the features of the hosted version include, among others:
- Built-in disaster recovery features;
- 99.9 percent "guaranteed uptime";
- Features that allow institutions to customize the look and feel of the suite, including controls over colors and logos appearing on pages;
- Support for Outlook and Apple synchronization;
- Mobile access via iPhone, J2ME devices, and mobile Web browsers;
- A group scheduling calendar with RSS and Atom support; and
- Offline access through the free Zimbra Desktop for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
"With over 30,000 students, faculty, and staff, not to mention thousands of alumni, we needed a collaboration system that would offer best-in-class e-mail and calendar for our students and enterprise features for our faculty," said James Lyall, associate vice prost of IT at Kansas State University, in a statement released Tuesday. "We evaluated many collaboration systems, and found that there was nothing else on the market that could compare to Zimbra Hosted, which offers superb technology, and delivers different tiers of service for our different constituencies. Additionally, we can retain control over the system through flexible branding and privacy options, without worrying about installation, upgrades or maintenance."
Zimbra Hosted for Education is available now. Pricing varies. Further information can be found here. A trial account can be set up here.