May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

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barrydegraaff
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by barrydegraaff »

Well I am an employee now and have been okayed to collaborate with you on the forums! But I know mostly about development of Zimlets and such.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by Robert1657 »

barrydegraaff wrote:Well I am an employee now and have been okayed to collaborate with you on the forums! But I know mostly about development of Zimlets and such.
Welcome Barry

Reference zimbra 9 modern ui zimlets where can new zimlets be downloaded from. Is there a market store As such like classic zimlets ?

Thanks
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by rleiker »

phoenix wrote:My questions to that comment is why is there 'political pressure' and what are they frightened of?
From what has been shared to-date, I believe it originates from compliance concerns since Synacor is a publicly traded company. They may be worried about an employee accidentally disclosing some bit of information that could give someone a kind of insider trader advantage with the company stock.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by rleiker »

barrydegraaff wrote:Well I am an employee now and have been okayed to collaborate with you on the forums! But I know mostly about development of Zimlets and such.

Thanks Barry, glad to have you with us on the forums.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by rleiker »

Hello Zimbra Community,

Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders: May 12, 2020 Conference Call Summary

Zimbra Open Source Policy Clarifications
Steve D., a Synacor employee who is responsible for Zimbra product management, discussed Synacor’s recently revised open source policy. He explained the differences between the Zimbra 8.8.15 and 9 open source policies:
  • The Modern UI in Zimbra 9 is commercially licensed, and not available for open source use.
  • No open source binaries will be provided by Synacor for Zimbra 9.
  • You can build your own Zimbra 9 binaries from the Zimbra 9 open source repos, but this will not include the Modern UI, only the Classic UI (as found in 8.8.15).
  • For Zimbra Network Edition (commercial) use, Synacor will grant access to the Modern UI source code, which may be needed for example, for a security audit or source code contribution.
  • The Zimbra open source contributions agreement for Zimbra 9 remains the same as it is for 8.8.15.
He also said open source access to Zimbra continues after 8.8.15 in to version 9, so 8.8.15 is not the end of the line, but with the aforementioned changes. A Q&A document is being prepared by Synacor related to these changes that will provided to all Zimbra partners.

Zimbra 9 UI Questions and Comments
Geert H. asked, for Zimbra 9 users who self-compile or obtain a community provided binary of Zimbra 9, what will the experience be like for users of the Mobile version of the Zimbra Web Client. Steve answered that the Mobile version of the Zimbra Web Client has been removed from both the commercial and open source editions of Zimbra 9. Since only the Classic UI will be available in Zimbra 9 open source edition, mobile users would have to use the Classic UI, if possible.

Wendell J. commented that if the Modern UI is the only UI receiving new features in Zimbra 9, then it would appear to represent a dead-end for open source Zimbra. Steve D. said that 8.8.15 is still supported for at least the next 3 years (until December 31, 2023) and that policies can always change during that time, based on partner and community needs.

Zimbra 9 Upgrade Questions
Geert H. asked if Synacor will require upgrading from 8.8.15 to 9 to continue to receive support. Steve D. said the plan is to continue providing patches and support for both versions, and added that the determination of whether or not to upgrade is dependent on if a customer needs new features introduced in version 9.

Gary C asked if it was possible to introduce a Zimbra 9 mailbox server in to an existing Zimbra 8.8.15 cluster as a method of trying it out. Steve D. said that since Zimbra Network Edition 9 offers both the Classic and Modern UI, that the recommendation is to upgrade an existing 8.8.15 cluster to 9 to avoid compatibility issues. This would allow for running either UI version on a Zimbra 9 cluster. John E. added that the Zimbra 9 back end is an evolution of Zimbra 8 and is not significantly different. Gary C. also asked if anyone on the call knew of blocking issues known to prevent upgrades to version 9. John H. said he was only aware of some earlier issues reported around the Zimbra Docs server, but they have been fixed by the development team at Zextras.

Zimbra 9 Language Support
Geert H. asked if there are plans to add more translations to Zimbra 9, specifically the Dutch language. Steve D. and Barry D. both said that upcoming patches will introduce support for Dutch and a number of additional languages, which will be released in batches. The first two batches are anticipated to add support for the languages: Russian, Polish, Vietnamese, Romanian, Turkish, and others too. Steve said that if a customer needs a specific translation to meet a business need, to let Synacor know so they can prioritize the translation efforts appropriately since they are doing the translations in-house.

Upgrading Third-Party Components in Zimbra
Geert H. asked about the status of upgrading Nginx and OpenSSL components which are very outdated in Zimbra 8.8.15 and 9 as discussed here: https://github.com/Zimbra/packages/pull/112 . Steve said that an Nginx upgrade is in process for both Zimbra 9 and Zimbra Cloud (Zimbra X). He said he needs to check if Nginx will be upgraded in 8.8.15 and report back. He has not seen any plans to upgrade OpenSSL at this time, other than some internal discussions in Synacor about adding support for TLS 1.3 to Zimbra.

Steve said that, going forward, a benefit of Zimbra 9 is that third-party components are anticipated to be upgraded sooner as new versions become available from those third-party sources.

Zimbra Road Map Plans
Steve D. said that the Briefcase feature is anticipated to be added to the Modern UI in Zimbra 9. However, the architecture changes (Kubernetes and Docker Containers) introduced in Zimbra X, and currently available in Zimbra Cloud, will not be back-ported to Zimbra 9 or 8.8.15.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by fs.schmidt »

Hello guys,

Since you have discussed about updating the Nginx package, is there any work to implement the SMTP proxy in Zimbra Nginx Proxy? I mean, Zimbra already uses proxy for almost every protocol but the SMTP, which would make it much easier to work with multiple tenants and multiple certificates.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by phoenix »

rleiker wrote:
phoenix wrote:My questions to that comment is why is there 'political pressure' and what are they frightened of?
From what has been shared to-date, I believe it originates from compliance concerns since Synacor is a publicly traded company. They may be worried about an employee accidentally disclosing some bit of information that could give someone a kind of insider trader advantage with the company stock.
That makes sense but my question stil remains, what are the frightened of? Don't they trust their staff to remain circumspect when they're on the forums? Yahoo was a publicly traded companty when they owned Zimbra but I didn't see any such restrictions on the staff posting in the forums during their ownership of Zimbra.

My take away from your recent conference call summary is that, basically, the forums are a dead duck. There would be no reason for Synacor to continue providing a public forum when all they intend to do is provide source code for others to build their 'own' Zimbra server.
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Bill

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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by BradC »

phoenix wrote:My take away from your recent conference call summary is that, basically, the forums are a dead duck. There would be no reason for Synacor to continue providing a public forum when all they intend to do is provide source code for others to build their 'own' Zimbra server.
The problem is nobody is going to support one or more third party builds of Zimbra. It's such a complicated beast to build and deploy, any subtle issues with the build process are going to go unnoticed until issues crop up in production, then it'll be "Talk to the builder/packager, nothing to do with us". It also appears to be a nicely subtle way of holding a gun to ZeXtras head. "Exhibiting an issue on an OSS build? Nothing to do with us mate, talk to the packager", or better "you want to keep selling products and support on the OSS side? Build it and support yourself then".

I understand Synacor probably don't want to devote the time required to build the OSS packages, but then where is the incentive to keep the public source tree up to date and building cleanly? There's no bug tracker we can use to even report issues. If they aren't eating their own dogfood, there is a whole lot less incentive to care about the taste. It'll just become progressively less palatable until nobody wants to eat it anymore, which is a self solving problem.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by barrydegraaff »

Robert1657 wrote:Reference zimbra 9 modern ui zimlets where can new zimlets be downloaded from. Is there a market store As such like classic zimlets ?
They are available from the Zimbra 9 yum/apt repositories. So if you install Zimbra 9 you can `yum list available | grep zimlet` or apt-show-versions to find them.
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Re: May 2020 Zeta Alliance Weekly Call Summaries

Post by ghen »

fs.schmidt wrote:Since you have discussed about updating the Nginx package, is there any work to implement the SMTP proxy in Zimbra Nginx Proxy? I mean, Zimbra already uses proxy for almost every protocol but the SMTP, which would make it much easier to work with multiple tenants and multiple certificates.
Basically postfix already is the "proxy" between the outside world and your mailbox backend, which you can scale on its own. Why would you want to put an extra proxy layer in front of that?
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