Zimbra and Indiatimes…email wakes up

Okay neither Indiatimes nor Zimbra can hardly be called startups, but I had to write this, Why? simple its because of the potential of this “togetherness’ But before I get into this extra marital affair, a little info on the new email.

I tried it out, I am a yahoo fan, never moved to gmail, rediffmail or hotmail (as if), in fact I am not really a fan of email anymore, and feel that email for corporates will be dead in a few years( multi project, task list, grouping systems are needed), BUT, whilst we are still alive and using it, we may as well use the best.

A year, or maybe more I came across zimbra, which to me was the best thing to happen to email, since domain names were invented. (If you don’t get the joke, don’t stress it). I registered with Indiatimes, read the press reports, its supposed to be an all singing and all dancing email system, with communities etc, but I was let down. Its actually just vanilla zimbra (a few zimlets specific to Indiatimes).
After getting over my initial disappointment I took another look, I noticed it had a couple of links which allowed you to translate emails, shop, or search for travel without leaving the email. But even then, all my excitement just drained away, Why? because Indiatimes has a platform which does so much more than this, why would you just allow users to do what they can from the website…so it saves them a click of the mouse button ?

To explain my disappointment let me explain to non-Zimbra users about what Zimbra can do. Zimbra has these wonderful little plugins (Zimbra is opensource), called zimlets, these allow users to do things like make skype calls by clicking on a telephone number in an email, they allow you to map the location given in a email. They allow you to track invoices and stock within your company for order processing.

Credit where credits due, Indiatimes new email, does allow you to share calendars, it does allow you to share files, and tag your email, which is great for multi project work, BUT the question I still have, is why are the wow factors not their.

A few suggestions (who am I to suggest :-))

1. Get a zimlet written which can work with routeguru.com, so that when I get an email with an Indian address, I can right click and it shows me the location.

2. Get the asterisk plugin up and running, and let me make a VOIP call from the email

3. Get your users to write their own zimlets, eg into facebook, orkut etc

4. Partner with dimdim and get online web conferencing built in also

and the last one to me is the biggest, Zimbra comes with a plugin into salesforce.com, add that plugin, and sell Zimbra accounts to every SME in India complete with a low cost online CRM system, QED

One more thing, I accept cheques in any currency 🙂

For all those others ISP’s, portals, Zimbra is opensource, you can download and install yourself, and give to your customers. the paid version is a per mailbox offering, but is more network robust (opensource one can be hacked to achieve same thing). But to me the power in Zimbra is NOT the email (that is dead…or will be) but the open platform, and the use of email as a base to upsell other services.

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