Last week, the long-awaited release of the popular add-on set for the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition called Zextras Suite 3.0 took place. As befits a major release, in addition to various bug fixes, a lot of significant changes have been added to it. They bring the functionality of Zextras Suite to a fundamentally new level compared to the 2.x branch. In version 3.0, Zextras developers focused on improving the functionality of collaboration and communication between users. Let's take a closer look at all the innovations that the Zextras Suite developers have prepared for us.
One of the main innovations in version 3.0 is Zextras Docs, which is a complete document collaboration tool. It allows employees of the enterprise to view and edit text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Currently, Zextras Docs supports editing of all open text formats, and also has support for MS Word, MS Excel and even RTF formats. The document viewer feature directly in the web interface is available for more than 140 different file formats. In addition, thanks to Zextras Docs, you can quickly turn any text document into a pdf file. Domestic users will certainly appreciate the presence in Zextras Docs of a Russian dictionary for spell checking.
But the main advantage of Zextras Docs over traditional office suites is the ability to collaborate on documents right in the Zimbra OSE web client. The author of a text, table or presentation can make his document publicly available, as well as invite other employees to view or edit it. At the same time, he can grant some employees the rights to directly edit the document, allow some to only view it, and allow some to leave comments on the text, which can then be added to the text or ignored.
Thus, Zextras Docs is a full-featured document collaboration solution that can be deployed in your enterprise and thus avoid transferring data to third-party services.
The second important innovation was the emergence of Zextras Team, which replaced Zextras Chat. Like its predecessor, Zextras Team allows you to organize more convenient communication and interaction between employees of the enterprise through text chats, as well as video and voice calls.
Zextras Team exists in two editions: Pro and Basic. Users of the Basic version of the solution will have access to a 1:1 chat that will support not only text communication, but also file sharing and video calls. Pro version users will have access to many more features. In particular, Zextras Team Pro will be able to turn your Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open-Source Edition into a complete video conferencing system with support for channels, virtual conference rooms and instant video meetings that do not require the use of third-party software and services. In order to add users to such a video meeting, it is enough just to send him a special link, upon clicking on which the employee will immediately join the video chat.
The flexible and smart sidebar of Zextras Team Pro allows you to get quick access to recent conversations, and a special interface allows you to create groups, start new conversations, as well as access channels and virtual meeting rooms that allow a group of users to exchange messages and files, as well as make video calls and even share the screens of their devices.
Among other advantages of Zextras Team, we note that it is fully compatible with the Zextras backup system, which means that the chat history and contact lists of employees will be constantly backed up and will not be lost anywhere even in the event of a massive failure. Another big plus of Zextras Team is its availability on mobile devices. The specially designed application for Android and iOS devices is available for users of both Basic and Pro editions of Zextras Team, and provides the same functionality as the web version of Zextras Team, allowing employees to participate in work chats even when they are away from the workplace.
Another new feature currently in beta is Blobless redundancy. It allows you to avoid backing up blobs of various elements while keeping all other data associated with them. With this feature, Zimbra OSE administrators will be able to optimize disk space usage during backup and restore speed when using built-in backup or data replication mechanisms.
Also in beta testing is the Raw-restore feature. It is a Disaster Recovery mechanism that allows for lower-level recovery, restoring all item metadata while retaining the original IDs for all recovered items, and is compatible with both regular and blobless backups. In addition, Raw Restore allows you to restore the source server's centralized storage configuration so that any data stored there is immediately available. Raw recovery will also be useful for those who use local or cloud secondary volumes for data storage. With the blob restore capability built into the Raw restore feature, you can easily move item blobs from primary to secondary storage.
The Zextras website has also been significantly redesigned. Now it has a more modern design and has become more convenient in terms of navigation. We invite you to evaluate the innovations yourself by going to .
In addition to all of the above, Zextras Suite 3.0 contains a lot of other, smaller fixes and bug fixes. You can find a complete list of them by going to .
For all questions related to Zextras Suite, you can contact the Representative of Zextras company Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail [email protected]
Source: habr.com