So, here I am again, after some time.

Today we’ll talk about Zimlets, as we released our first one. Well, it was an Admin extension, to be precise.

Here at YetOpen we believe a lot in Zimbra, the wonderful open source collaboration suite. And all the efforts we spend in studying, helping and distributing it are here to prove it. One more step forward was moved today, with the release of an extension for the admin interface, used to integrate mail accounts with the powerful mail backup solution hosted by Promo, a local service provider.

Basically, we added a new panel to the account creation wizard, and to the account editor, which allows the administrator to check if the mailbox is selected for backup. When saving account, a request is sent to the backup server to alert it about the status change.

The extension itself is not very complicated. Per choice, it doesn’t store anything into Zimbra’s LDAP. But there were some other difficulties, like having the server perform AJAX calls on a remote host, which is, for security reasons, forbidden! Yes, Zimbra provides a proxy interface available at /service/proxy/?target= to perform such requests. Sadly, it won’t work for the admin interface. In case you try, you will get a SOAP reply saying system failure: Request not allowed on port 7071.

Luckily there is (almost) always an escape, this time given by jXHR. jXHR is a pure Javascript library providing JSON-P calls. The library fitted perfectly into the extension, and didn’t cause any issue when included into the zip package.

We will probably even disclose the source, not far in the future. Stay in touch…