Zarafa announces new Community Hub and certification program

Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of a new community web site. The new Zarafa Community Hub (zarafa-community.org) was announced at this year's EMEA Red Hat Partner Summit and is designed to enable its partners and community members to easily manage their contributions around the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP), such as extensions and plugins.

The new hub does not replace existing systems for contributing changes to the platform itself; Zarafa says it still expects patches to be sent to developer@zarafa.com or posted in its forum after developers have consulted the contribution agreements on the company's developer overview page.

The open source groupware vendor has also introduced a new certification program for integrations. With the program, projects can register and apply to become Zarafa Ready or Zarafa Certified, provided that they meet certain criteria. Some certified projects can also gain official (end user) support by Zarafa.

The Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) is a Linux-based groupware product which offers IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway, native MAPI integration with Outlook, and its own WebAccess web client. Visually, the WebAccess client is closely based on Outlook 2003 and offers almost all of the features found in Outlook Web Access. The community edition is licensed under the Affero GPLv3.

See also:

• Zarafa SummerCamp 2011 programme published, a report from The H.
• Mandriva & Zarafa announce partnership, a report from The H.
• Open source Exchange replacements, a feature from The H.

(djwm)