Having just arrived here in San Francisco this afternoon to spend a week looking at Web 2.0 products and technologies, I had an interesting conversation with Chris Boni about Zimbra’s open-source, Web-based collaborative email product. Unlike many of today’s Web 2.0 products and services aimed at the consumer market — of which the MySpace social-networking sites are the epitome — Zimbra’s product is aimed at the corporate marketplace, and it looks like a winner.

Let’s start with the basics: everyone’s got e-mail, right? And everyone’s got a calendar program on their office PC, right? Well, not necessarily: Boni reminded me that a lot of “edge” or “boundary” employees in small and medium companies don’t even have a PC, let alone email. They may be transient workers, clerical/administrative personnel, or blue-collar workers for whom the investment never seemed justified to the corporate bean-counters. Ironically, though, most of these folks do have email, instant-messaging, and various other forms of communication on their cell-phone, and perhaps on a PC at home.

Similarly, while just about anyone with a PC (at home or in the office) will have a calendaring program, group calendaring is still somewhat of a rarity, especially in small companies. Traditional solutions to the email/group-calendaring issue typically involve additional expenses associated with dedicated client PCs for non-equipped users, server hardware, server software, client software, and installation/deployment activities. Large companies typically went through all of that 5-10 years ago, when they installed products like Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes on an enterprise basis. But small-to-medium companies, who never made the commitment and who would prefer not to incur the expense, can take advantage of web-based (group) calendaring/email — which avoids the need for a dedicated PC for each employee, as well as the need for installed/deployed software. It should be noted that Zimbra does require a server for its back-end functionality, but for small companies that don’t want to bother with such details, the server can be hosted by one of the company’s business partners.

Boni described some additional features of Zimbra’s email that sysops and administrators would appreciate, even if they appeared mundane to the typical end-user. For example, Zimbra’s sophisticated message-storage capabilities enable it to save only one copy of an email message that’s transmitted to a group of users, rather than multiple copies associated with each individual user. That can obviously save a lot of storage if the messages have large attachments; but it’s surprising how much it can save with just the text messages themselves. I’ve spent a lot of time working with lawyers in recent years, doing postmortems to figure out whether it was the vendor’s mistakes or the customer’s mistakes (or some combination of the two) that caused a large, expensive software development project to fail. This can involve reviewing tens of thousands of email messages between the various parties, and the amount of duplication is staggering.

Well, web-based applications are certainly gaining more popularity in today’s environment, and open-source software is economically attractive, and sophisticated message storing (along with sophisticated backup/restore capabilities) are good, too — but where’s the “sex appeal” that we expect to see in Web 2.0 products these days? In Zimbra’s case, it’s the mashup capability that takes advantage of Ajax and standard web services to integrate several different applications and external content into the email client, rather than having to keep several different applications open, and bounce back and forth between them.

Instead of waving my hands (metaphorically speaking) and laboriously pasting some graphics into this blog posting, let me suggest that you visit the demo portion of Zimbra’s web site to see some of their examples — e.g., being able to click a section of text in an email message that represents a date (not just obvious text strings like “October 15th”, but also “tomorrow” or “next Tuesday”), and have a popup window immediately display the relevant portion of one’s calendar. Another “canned” mashup displays Outlook-style contact information if the user lets his mouse hover over the name of a contact embedded within an email message; still another one takes advantage of the familiar Google Maps mashup to display geographic information from appropriate text in an email message.

Products like Microsoft Outlook accomplish some degree of integration — i.e., combining email, calendar, contacts, and to-do list in one massive program — but the integration is not as granular or flexible as I would want. Well, maybe it is; my own personal experience is not based on Outlook per se, but rather Microsoft’s Mac-based Outlook-like product called Entourage. After several determined efforts to take advantage of the integration of these various functions, I finally gave up and retreated to a semi-integrated product suite (Now Up To Date, and Now Contact), and continue to daily suffer the inconvenience and inefficiency of not having any integration (let alone tight, granular-level integration) between my email and the calendar/contact suite, or email with spreadsheet, or email with Google Maps. (For what it’s worth, the next release of Apple’s operating system, Leopard, will supposedly offer tighter and more user-friendly integration of its email program with its iCal calendar, its Address Book contact-manager, and a note/to-do list capability; but that’s not coming until next spring.)

So the idea of integrating all of this together in the smooth, user-friendly way that Zimbra seems to do is intuitively appealing — indeed, it’s highly appealing, and if I were running a company with a dozen networked knowledge users, I would be highly tempted to try it out. (It’s important to remember that the devil is in the details, and it’s not until you (and your co-workers) have actually used something like this for a few weeks that you can really tell whether the subtle nuances are as good as they should be; that’s one reason the free, open-source version is so attractive.) But if I were a conservative, penny-pinching CFO or CIO, I might want to see some credible productivity studies to see just how much time and money my knowledge workers could be expected to save with a product like Zimbra; alas, Chris Boni tells me that he’s not aware of any such studies having yet been carried out.

By the way, it’s also important to note that while Zimbra’s server provides built-in features like Outlook access, it also has an extensible framework, so that customers can build their own mashups, and customize them to their own idiosyncratic needs. I have to be a little careful here, because not everyone who uses Zimbra will necessarily get the same feature set. As already noted, Zimbra provides an open source version of its product — and that’s free, but contains only 90% of the full feature set. The commercial “networked” product, for which Zimbra does charge a free, contains the full feature set. Chris Boni tells me that “thousands” of people have downloaded the open-source version, and that Zimbra has “hundreds” of customers running the networked (commercial) version. Networked customers include educational institutions like Ohio State University and Eastern Illinois University, as well as H&R Block, Interim Healthcare, and Zip Realty.

If I were an executive, employee, or investor in Zimbra (full disclosure: I have absolutely no business or financial relationship with the company at all), I would probably be spending some sleepless nights worrying about the 800-pound gorillas who could conceivably represent serious competition for the company’s future. IBM’s Lotus Notes wouldn’t keep me awake, but Microsoft might, and Google’s steady stream of web-based mail/collaboration products might, too. But Google seems to be aiming primarily at the consumer marketplace, and its recent products don’t seem to have the robust, industrial-strength capabilities that Zimbra exhibits.

And as for Microsoft … well, I think it’s too early to tell how robust and full-featured its Office Live products will be, and how much it will be able to shift its feature set away from proprietary, non-mashed client/server products like Outlook to the open, mashed-up, web-based products that Zimbra exemplifies. And unlike a decade ago, when Microsoft had only one nemesis — i.e, Netscape — to focus on, now it has an entire industry of nimble, innovative competitors like Zimbra. Perhaps the worst fate that Zimbra would have to anticipate in this competitive scenario is being acquired by Microsoft at some point down the road.

All in all, it was a productive afternoon, and I’m highly impressed with Zimbra. It looks like the company is on the verge of releasing a new version of its product (already available as a beta) that will provide sophisticated features for sharing and collaborating on “rich” documents that can contain embedded spreadsheets, etc. Again, this looks like it will be much more robust and “enterprise-oriented” than the consumer-style word-processing capabilities that Google is introducing with Writely. So it looks like Zimbra is a company you should put on your radar screen and watch closely in the coming months. I wish them the best of success.