VORARI Latest News

VORARI & Zimbra Speaking at Cloud World Forum, Institute of Physics

2009-09-18T04:49:44Z

Join VORARI and Zimbra at this years Cloud World Forum on 22nd October at the Institute of Physics in London. We will be discussing how Zimbra's web-services enabled messaging platform is the ideal tool for presenting organisational data mashups - because it offers something that makes the data truly useful: Context.

Institute of Physics
76 Portland Place
London
W1B 1NT

Zimbra Clients Runing on Snow Leopard

2009-08-31T23:23:19Z

Last week Apple released Snow Leopard. We’ve now had a few days to evaluate it. (Ok three. We got ours delivered the day it was available.) We won’t detail all the new features in the OS as there are plenty of reviews on Snow Leopard. Of interest specifically to our clients however is Zimbra and its compatibility with Snow Leopard. We’re pleased to say that thus far we haven’t seen any major show stoppers.

Zimbra Sync Services for OS-X:

The Zimbra plugin for OS-X Sync services as you might expect is 32 bit. So in the new Snow Leopard system preferences pane, when you try to access it you will be presented with a friendly dialog asking you to reload in 32 bit:

Other than that the plugin seems to work fine.

Zimbra Desktop (Mac)

This one was interesting. We have only had the chance to confirm this on a single mac - but after the upgrade Zimbra Desktop wouldn’t load, yielding a non-descript javascript error. We ended up reinstalling it and worked fine.

*Update* Zimbra 1.0.3 has been released which resolves this issues.

VORARI Moving to a new Premium Hosted Provider

2009-08-03T22:32:33Z

Dear all,

We wanted to alert you to the fact that we're changing hosting providers. We wanted to take a moment to explain who we're moving to and why.

As many of you know we currently run our platform on Rackspace managed hosting. When we selected Rackspace our focus was to find a hosting provider that delivered not just excellent performance and support but also proactive server management. That is to say a provider that works with you to ensure your hosting is always at its best. This is a service we find to be lacking in a number of hosting providers. I'd like to say there are only a handful in the same league as Rackspace but even that might be too generous. There are very few alternatives to Rackspace. When a company feels that they are in a league of their own the danger is complacency.

So we took the decision to find an alternative hosting provider in the UK that matched Rackspace’s service level but also could deliver the necessary value we needed to accommodate our growth.

We believe that other player to be UKFast.

We’ve been watching them closely and they have impressed us with their consistent high performance and dedicated service. And their accolades speak volumes. They have won several ISPA's awards for the last four years running and numerous other awards that speak to their commitment to excellence.

UKFast also has the fastest network in the UK, so we believe that our collective needs will be best served by placing our hosting with them. We intend to switch services over in the next two weeks. Nothing needs to be done on your end. You can continue with your services as you have today. We will make all the necessary changes on our end during a 3 hr maintenance window. We have scheduled this change to take place in the early hours of Wednesday morning on the 12th of August / (Late Tuesday evening).

Best Regards,

The VORARI team.

FireFox 3.5 Released. Faster Zimbra Admin UI.

2009-06-30T16:56:00Z

Today Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 calling it a major update to browser delivers significant performance improvements, privacy enhancements, support for new Web standards, and greater customization options. We tested with Zimbra interface and were quite pleased with the results.

Mozilla claims Firefox 3.5 to be the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released. The newest version of Firefox is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites. Like the new version of Safari, it includes a new javascript treewalker - delivering radically improved JavaScript performance. The improved Javascript performance was quite a welcome improvement to have in Zimbra’s Admin web client - an area that in not currently supported by WebKit at the moment. The overall web interface itself is fast - although I prefer using Safari on the Mac for day to day business email. Overall we found the interface to be faster to navigate.

The other area that we are really excited about is native JSON support and Location Aware Browsing and the opportunities to use Zimlets that take advantage of this capability.

For more information please see http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/press/2009/06/30/1293-mozilla-advances-the-web-with-firefox-35

VORARI at Being Digital Event

2009-06-05T22:24:01Z

Being-Digital ‘09 is the annual headline event for the digital industry from the people at mashup* on 9th June 2009. Come by to learn more about VORARI’s products and services in person.

The full day will bring together innovative and influential senior executives, entrepreneurs and investors from a diverse range of businesses affected by digital technology. The purpose of the event is to help attendees develop the knowledge base required to be successful with international business in the digital age.

Being-Digital ‘09 will offer you a full day with opportunities to:

Learn about what it takes to be successful in digital from some of the most influential people in the global industry
Debate interactively during the sessions with live questions from the audience including input from SMS and Twitter
Understand the major digital trends that are shaping international businesses today with insights from people shaping the industry, big corporate company strategies, and the most innovative new early stage companies
Evaluate how to use trends in the digital world to increase the chances of success with your business strategy, both at home and abroad
Network with key players that are shaping digital businesses around the world

All Delegates will also receive a £40 voucher for virtual office services from eOffice and all food and drink for the day is included in the price of admission.

For more information please visit http://www.being-digital.com/

RPost Expands Registered Email Service with VORARI

2009-05-26T14:23:00Z

RPost Expands Registered E-mail and eSignOff Services in the UK through Alliance with VORARI

RPost’s Patented Registered E-mail Service—Now Made Available in Zimbra’s Webmail Client by VORARI—is a Very Low Cost Tool that Reduces Risk in Disputes Involving E-mail, Giving Senders the Upper Hand with Certified Delivery Evidence, Tracking and E-mail Content Proof

Los Angeles and London—- May 26, 2009—- RPost®, the leader in value-added outbound messaging with its flagship Registered E-mail® service suite, and VORARI, a managed cloud services provider in London, today announced a partnership to offer RPost’s Registered E-mail® delivery proof, eSignOff™ electronic contracting, SideNote™, and Proof Archive™ services to VORARI’s clients.

“VORARI is working with select partners to build out and integrate high value web-services into the messaging experience using Zimbra, as part of their Zimlet eco-system. RPost is a brilliant example of an enterprise class Zimlet that offers genuine value to people looking to` save costs by using technology instead of paper,” remarks Nagib Tharani, director at VORARI.
RPost’s core Registered E-mail® service provides the sender legally valid and court admissible evidence of e-mail correspondence occurring from the sender’s desktop e-mail or directly from applications—providing VORARI clients with evidence of delivery, content, and timing of any e-mail, without requiring recipients to download any software, click links, or visit special websites to open and read messages. RPost offers additional services, such as eSignOff™ electronic contract execution service, which enables a one-click-signoff-by-email with an evidentiary record of the signoff provided to both parties that has evidential weight equal to “wet-ink” signatures on contracts– eliminating the print/sign/scan/fax/mail signoff process. The complete RPost platform is offered at a flat per e-mail price, which is about the cost of a postage stamp and only a small fraction of typical courier charges. Monthly and annual all-inclusive services plans are also available.

“Since with two clicks of a mouse, one can change any email to say anything, the other party in an e-mail misunderstanding can easily claim that the printed e-mail records misrepresent the facts. Verification of e-mail evidence is certainly becoming a central part of discovery disputes in Europe, as it has in the US, especially as users are working to convert more high value correspondence from paper to e-mail,” remarks Zafar Khan, CEO of RPost. “We have found that many professionals are simply not aware of this exposure. We are pleased to be able to provide RPost’s total risk protection and efficiency services embedded within users’ existing VORARI-managed e-mail experience.”

For the highest assurance of confidentiality, the RPost system does not retain a copy of the original Registered E-mail message, unlike alternative “store and forward” solutions. RPost services also include one-click tools for electronic contracting and e-signing, end-to-end e-mail encryption, PDF conversion and data leak protection in an all-in-one, on demand service offering.

About VORARI: Established in 2007 and based in London, VORARI deploys production-grade services for businesses in the cloud, offering cost-effective, scalable, reliable and secure solutions. VORARI builds solutions around Zimbra’s collaboration suite, an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint as a collaborative hub for public and private clouds. Backed by Yahoo! and built from the ground up to support web services, Zimbra’s Zimlet architecture provides the ultimate framework for accessing, interfacing with and manipulating data by enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate both existing and emerging cloud services around an open-source collaboration platform. VORARI provides these services to enterprises and ISP’s across Rackspace, VMware and Amazon’s EC2. VORARI also provides development services to service providers looking to expose their services as Zimlets. For more information about VORARI please visit http://www.vorari.com. Media Enquiries: pr@vorari.com. +44 203 002 3671.

About RPost: RPost has set the global standard for Legal Proof® in Internet e-mail with its core Registered E-mail® proof of legal delivery and eSignOff™ electronic contracting services. RPost services permit the sender to prove, sign, secure, record, and collaborate with less cost, time, paper and risk. Available in eight languages and for all e-mail platforms, RPost’s Registered E-mail® services have been granted 19 patents, have been used daily by the United States Government since 2003, and have been endorsed and marketed by most of the influential bar associations in the United States, including the bars of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and the District of Columbia. Headquartered in Los Angeles, RPost has offices worldwide. For more information about RPost, please visit http://www.rpost.com . “Registered E-mail”, “R-mail”, “RPost” and “Legal Proof” are among the registered trademarks owned by RPost. Media Contact: Aparna Glynn, Marketing Director, (310) 342-0088, aglynn@rpost.com

VORARI & Zimbra UK at Cloud Expo Europe

2009-05-18T23:29:00Z

Be sure to come see VORARI and Zimbra at stand #54 at Cloud Expo Europe, being held at the Barbican exhibition halls in London on May 20th and 21st. On Wednesday May 20th, we will be giving a presentation with Lars Ronning, General Manager for Zimbra EMEA in the Business Track 1 section at 12:15pm. We will be giving a presentation on Zimbra’s feature set and how Zimbra’s Collaboration Suite helps organisations improve their productivity by tightly integrating the messaging experience with web services to cloud service providers like Salesforce.com. We will also be providing details on deployment options for Zimbra in the cloud on Amazon’s EC2 and VMWare.

Zimbra Desktop Now GA

2009-04-28T16:08:00Z

Zimbra desktop has just gone GA. VORARI is proud to support this as part of our core offering. More details can be found here: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2009/04/announcing-zimbra-desktop-10-%e2%80%93-the-next-generation-email-client.html

Mashup* Cloud Computing Event

2009-04-24T13:55:00Z

Please join us at the mashup* event for a discussion around cloud computing. VORARI will be demoing at the event and available to address any questions you may have.

This mashup* event will focus on which are the best applications to run in/on the cloud and which ones locally and why! Like outsourcing, not everyone should do it, not every service is sensible and there are stong opinions in both camps.

The debate will cover data ownership, security, privacy, backup, staffing, policy and governance. There are many applications that should run on the cloud but is company policy protecting the directors or delivering shareholder return?

In assoication with: Sun Microsystems Ltd.

Location:

Regis House
45 King William Street
London
EC4R 9AN

Zimbra - 41 million paid mailboxes

2009-03-06T15:56:00Z

Zimbra paid mailboxes - 41 million and counting. This figure doesn’t include Zimbra’s millions of open source users. Very impressive growth given the current economic climate. Zimbra is a cost effective, powerful collaboration suite that is seeing rapid adoption worldwide. The growth opportunities for Zimbra outside North America are significant: In addition to strong overall mailbox momentum, over 68% of new prospects (68%) are coming from Latin America, Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). It is clear evidence of the power of a global open source community and the impact of new mandates for open source software. Below is a chart of Zimbra paying customers by region; all-in-all more than 60,000 organizations are using Zimbra.

Say NO to 0870 and 0845

2008-07-15T13:54:01Z

0870 / 0845 Scam Numbers

You might find a lot of service providers in the UK numbers that start with 08x - like 0800, 0808, 0870 and 0845. You see these numbers everywhere these days. These are non geographic numbers. In other words you can offer your service all over the UK and be perceived as a national player, even though you might be based in a single town. These number also tend to be memorable.

0800 and 0808 are Freephone numbers. That is - they are free to call in the UK from any landline.

A new crop of numbers were introduced - called 084x and 087x numbers. These numbers are revenue-share numbers. To the business procuring them, they are told that end users prefer a memorable 084x or 087x number. And because these are revenue share numbers, they can make money when you call them. Keeping customers on hold for just 15 minutes for a 10ppm call can really add up. Many providers are now using these 0870 and 0845 numbers. Banks and tech support lines are particularly fond of them. (You might notice a true 0800 or 0808 Freephone for sales inquiries and and 0870/0845 number for support.) And to an increasing extent, we’re also seeing them make their way into small businesses and the sole means of contact. This is wrong.

This is a key point - you need the 08x number to route to geographic phone number. Many UK organisations which previously could be reached by a geographical number now only publish an 0845 number. Now you know why!

The original idea was that if you are a large organization with many shops, you can have a single memorable number that is routed to the location nearest the caller and still be charged a local rate. Those rules changed in 2004: it is now cheaper to call a normal an 01/02 number direct. Most people with a basic phone package even have unlimited calls to 01/02 numbers.

There are several sites which provide more information on the subject:

Charges paid by the caller for 084x/087x calls are set by each phone company individually. Charges can vary greatly, especially when the call originates from a UK mobile or a non-UK number

Not all numbers are created equal. 0800 and 0808 are Freephone numbers. These numbers mean you pay for your customers to call you. But while they are completely free within the UK, if they are called by mobiles or VoIP providers (like Skype or Vonage), they too may be much more expensive.

For this reason, we want to be accessible to all our customers. Within the UK you can call us on Freephone 0808-1-VORARI (0808-1-86.72.74) - which we hope is memorable. But from your mobile or abroad - you can call us on +44 203 002 3761. Ideally we hope you’ll use our landline number - as it is cheaper for us, but we will never try to extort money from you.

We refuse to do business with companies that only have an 084x/087x numbers - we value our customers.

Firefox 3 released. Faster and more reliable

2008-06-22T15:20:00Z

Many of you will already know that firefox 3 was released last week. To those that don’t, Firefox 3 is the next major version of Mozilla’s browser. If you are still using Firefox 2 you should definitely upgrade.

We’ve been running with Firefox 3 in beta form for several months to ensure a smooth migration with the Zimbra web client on both the mac and the PC and it is FAST. Now that is ready for general availability there is no reason not to upgrade.

Find out more at: http://www.firefox.com

Zimbra: Mobile Me for business users

2008-06-22T15:19:00Z

Recently, Apple announced MobileMe. To call it just a re-branding of their existing .Mac would be a disservice. It really packs much more value into the package many of us have come to know and love. But their “exchange for the rest of us” tag line, while catchy, is not really appropriate. Apples’ service is designed for the individual. It is called Mobile “ME” for a reason - it allows you to do limited sharing with your friends and family - but it doesn’t really help when you need to collaborate with others.

More importantly, it only supports their iPhone, so mobile clients other than the iPhone are out of luck. I love the iPhone - and I can’t wait to get their 3G version, and this might not really be a decision for a family either - just be sure that all your family members have iPhones too. But it doesn’t cut it as a business platform where you have to accept diversity in clients.

“Exchange for the rest of us” is more apt in reference to Zimbra.

Zimbra lets you share files with your colleagues - but it offers you the ability to password protect the access, or to make your files public.

They support a wide variety of mobile clients, including the iPhone.

They allow you book appointments and check other folks schedules before putting out a meeting invitation.

And it works seamlessly with Outlook, provides native OS-X sync services support and even supports Linux clients. Not to mention the award winning AJAX browser interface both online and off-line. True freedom of choice.

At a similar price point per user per month.

Need to collaborate with others? Try Zimbra.

Dreamforce Europe 2008 - May 7th & 8th

2008-05-06T20:37:00Z

We’ll be at salesforce.com’s first European user and developer conference, held at the Barbican Centre in London. For more information on Dreamforce visit Dreamforce Europe

We all start using customer relationship management (CRM) for different reasons. And yet many people still don’t even understand what CRM is and how it can be of value to the organization. While everyone has different definitions, a working definition for me is the ability to add intelligence to your contact data. When you look at it this way, I’m often amazed to find many people still use CRM platforms as a glorified address book.

We’re a small company - so growth is a big priority for us. So while many people are offering some valuable solutions about how to analyse your data and to use a strategic selling approach - My priority is different: Get traffic to our site and convert users through as many channels as possible. So I’m using CRM with several keyword search schemes, like google along with dedicated campaign pages. But I’m advertising the old fashioned way too: magazine adverts, trade publications and of course exhibitions.

I’m most excited about being able to use saleforce to track my leads - where they’re coming from, what there responding to. Should be a fun 2 days. Will post an update after the event.

Welcome to Vorari!

2008-04-15T15:06:00Z

Welcome to our new site! There are still a few glitches which we will be fixing in realtime. We have worked long and hard to launch a clean and standards compliant site. Over the coming weeks we’ll be adding a lot of content and launching our forums and wiki in due course.

Building a proper website is a difficult and time consuming task. Usability and clean design, not to mention a well thought out structure for organising content is extremely important. Todays users access content through a variety of browsers and mobile devices and separating this content from the design was critical. Ease of access for adding new content is also very important requiring a standards-friendly content management system (CMS). We hope we have addressed all these design requirements properly and we look forward to your comments and feedback in the coming weeks and months.

The VORARI team.