I ‘ve blogged thought I had blogged before here about Zimbra and their demos of “desktop” or “disconnected” functionality.
Today, TechCrunch announced “Zimbra Desktop to Launch: Full Offline Functionality” - saying the launch will be announced “later this week.”
The alpha appears to be available already: Zimbra on your Desktop.
According to TechCrunch:
Zimbra Desktop will be available cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and cross browser (Firefox, IE, Safari). The Zimbra web application and all user data is stored on the client computer (the database is Apache Derby
). Data is synced real time when in online mode.
Zimbra Desktop does not include drag and drop functionality into the browser (for, say, dragging an attachment into an email), although the company says it will be included in a future release.
All Zimbra source code, including Zimbra Desktop, is open source - I expect other web developers to be taking a close look at how they are architecting things.
They’re using Apache Derby to store data client side and then synchronize/replicate with the server.
This may be just the nudge I need to finally leave Thunderbird behind altogether - right now I use Zimbra when connected and then Thunderbird to pull down mail so I can have it when offline.