ZiOffice currently offers hosted Zimbra™ messaging and collaboration. This means that we run the full "Network Edition" of the Zimbra suite on our dedicated servers in the United States and Thailand (for users inside Thailand). Zimbra is similar in concept to Microsoft's Exchange Server*, in that it offers:

• A central message store where all email, contacts, and calendars are stored.
• The ability to connect to this central store using Microsoft Outlook*, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail and iCal, and other dedicated email and PIM programs.
• An ajax-powered web-interface that provides the same "look & feel" of software that you install, but with none of the hassels (or security issues) of having to install anyting. Using either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, you can see all of your message folders, calendars, pull up your company directory (called the Global Address List, or GAL), and drag-and-drop messages and other items. The web-interface for Zimbra is so compelling, many users prefer it to using their old email clients.
• The ability to share your calendar with other people in your company, and to delegate either "view only" or "view and edit" permissions.
• An incredibly useful way to organize all of your information using tags. Create tags, assign a color, and drag-and-drop them onto anything to "tag" that item. Tags synchronize with Outlook categories.
• The ability to set up rules for filtering and sorting your email automatically based on multiple "rules" you can define.

One-way message flow of typical POP3 email service

With a normal POP3 mail account, your mail is delivered, usually unfiltered, to multiple different computers - your employees PCs and laptops -
where it's probably not being backed up often, and is putting your company at risk.

Two-way synchronized flow of mail, contacts and calendar using a Zimbra messaging server

With a messaging server, incoming messages are scanned for virus, filtered for spam, and stored in the centralized message store (database).
Two-direction syncing means all of your local "cache" of data is safely on the server, backed up,
and accessible from anywhere you can find a web-browser.

If your company currently uses the free "POP3" email that often comes free with web-hosting packages, all of your employees information - possibly tens of thousands of emails, contacts, and schedules - are sitting on their PCs, in individual message files. A single virus on your company network, or even a harddrive failure could cause incredibly expensive loss of data.

Zimbra's integrated anti-virus and anti-spam mean your network is actually safer - and you don't need to constantly purchase desktop anti-spam software. Also, our Zimbra servers use multiple levels of backup so that, even in the unlikely event of a serious hardware failure, your data will be restored to the point-in-time of failure.

So why use Zimbra instead of Microsoft Exchange? Some of the ways in which Zimbra's architecture is superior, in our opinion, to Exchange include:

• Zimbra includes a powerful indexing engine which scans all messages, and builds a search-index, including attachments. Unlike Exchange, where searching through hundreds or thousands of emails can take minutes, searching 5,000 items in your Zimbra account takes a few seconds.
• Information about messages, called "meta-data" (such as what tags are associated with it, what folder it is in, etc.) are stored in a fast relational database. One common complaint about Exchange is that it's proprietary "document store" is slow and prone to becoming corrupted. This document store is a heirarchal data store, which is itself stored in the file-system. With Zimbra, messages are stored directly in the file-system. It's very fast.
• Zimbra's web-client includes built-in auto-linking of phone numbers, addresses, urls, days and dates - something Outlook Web Access does not do.
• Because many of Zimbra's core pieces are built on solid and mature open-source technology, hosted Zimbra messaging is more affordable - especially for small businesses that don't want to be stuck in a proprietary solution.

*You can use Microsoft's Outlook 2003 email client with the Zimbra-Outlook Connector (which we provide free with your account) to sync all of your email and PIM information with the Zimbra server, or alternatively you can use Outlook's built-in IMAP connectivity to sync only your messages. We also provide you with the Zimbra Outlook Import Wizard, which you can use to automatically import all of your Outlook .pst data files into Zimbra server - all of your folders, calendars, contacts and email are imported.

Note that "Microsoft Outlook" and "Microsoft Exchange Server"are the trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. ZiOffice is not affiliated in any way with Microsoft. Zimbra is a trademark of Zimbra, Inc. ZiOffice is a Zimbra hosting provider, but is otherwise not affiliated with Zimbra Inc.