While reading the morning news, I found an entry on JavaLobby talking about a new Open Source Collaboration system written in Java. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is a Java-based, AJAX-enabled web application that can do email, contacts, calendar, etc.

I used the demo and I’m very impressed. I see that they have borrowed many concepts from Gmail, like tags (labels in gmail), easy searching, etc., but I also find new things like saved searches, and smart linking, which creates links on various types of content, like dates, phone numbers, even package tracking codes. The conversation view lets you see all the related emails on all the different folders, which is also a nice thing.

Zimbra is released under the Zimbra Public License (ZPL), which is a derivative of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). They also offer a commercial license, for companies who don’t agree with Open Source (what’s not to agree?).

Anyway, this is a very cool application, and hopefully will become a very succesful one.