Web 2.0 E-mail, Calendar, Contacts

I’m glad to announce a new module in 6zap, Zcounts. Zcounts generate e-mail aliases giving you better control over spam from e-mail addresses provided to third-party entities. It also helps you track all your accounts created on the Web and improve personal security by generating random passwords that are stored in a central location.

Check out the Zcounts movie showing how to create a Zcount while signing up for a YouTube account.

To use Zcounts, you drag a bookmarklet, to your toolbar and whenever you go to a site that requires an email address, you create a new Zcount that include:

• An email alias to your main account
• Information about the Web site this alias is associated with such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc
• Optionally, a randomly generated password

At any time you can delete or suspend an alias giving you control over which the sites that are allowed to send you email. As an added benefit, you have a list of all the places where you signed up for an account. and the username you used.

With Zcounts no more

• What login name did I use for this web site?
• Did I already sign up for this?
• Which passwords of my 4 regular passwords did I use?
• Who has been giving away my email to third parties?
• And most important, how do I stop getting email from these people?

Last week we deployed version 0.14 of 6zap. The main feature that we introduced in this release is the new file module. You can upload your files and save them online within 6zap in different folders. There’s a familiar file explorer similar to the one on your desktop. In the next version of 6zap we’ll also provide ways for you to share files.

6zap File Module

We’ve also added and Agenda view to the calendar where you can see your events as a list. On the admin side we now provide a way for the administrator to create users. Our technical users will be happy to hear that we now concatenate all the javascript files reducing the number of http connections required to load the page. Our non-technical users should know that it’s just a fancy way to say things load faster :-).

All in all, there were 253 issues in this release. The following is the list of the most relevant ones.

• New Feature
  • ARGOS-1232 - New Agenda/list view
  • ARGOS-1273 - Dynamic check of user name availability
  • ARGOS-1481 - Admin create new users
  • ARGOS-1652 - New file manager module
• Improvementr
  • ARGOS-1051 - when creating new event - put focus into “Subject” field
  • ARGOS-688 - Replace second+ occurrence of “RE:
  • ARGOS-1061 - Ability to delete group in Contacts
  • ARGOS-1209 - Email search should be indexed
  • ARGOS-1393 - UI improvements
  • ARGOS-1445 - Restore after failed folder refresh
  • ARGOS-1475 - Make preview image clickable
  • ARGOS-1482 - Add autocomplete to group field when editing contact
  • ARGOS-1511 - when replying on my mail - change assignee
  • ARGOS-1529 - Download a file automatically
  • ARGOS-1657 - Show url for sharing
• Task
  • ARGOS-985 - minimize the sources
  • ARGOS-1508 - Create Developers Manual for Contacts
  • ARGOS-1524 - Quick installation guide for “files”
  • ARGOS-1619 - Readme file for file explorer
• Bug
  • ARGOS-553 - in plain-text messages convert URL into hyperlinks
  • ARGOS-1002 - It is possible to create contact with all the empty fields
  • ARGOS-1071 - new public.php for showing public calendars
  • ARGOS-1106 - Merge all JS files into single file
  • ARGOS-1159 - Server returns badly escaped utf chars
  • ARGOS-1178 - Alarms do not work for recurring events
  • ARGOS-1223 - Long search query causes broking layout
  • ARGOS-1249 - Memory allocation error
  • ARGOS-1269 - Exceptions from recurrence stopped to work
  • ARGOS-1284 - User should not be able to delete not empty folder
  • ARGOS-1329 - refreshState request goes twice per minute
  • ARGOS-1331 - Current message does not hide on empty folder
  • ARGOS-1352 - Useless “\n” symbols are added to the end of the message
  • ARGOS-1357 - grid dependant operations cannot be performed in search results
  • ARGOS-1378 - Long lines are not wrapped
  • ARGOS-1385 - JS code is being added to message during spell check
  • ARGOS-1413 - Search in box search in whole mail body
  • ARGOS-1432 - Missing some recurring events in the day view
  • ARGOS-1449 - Make server run not through the proxy
  • ARGOS-1458 - clicking on rich text editor should focus it
  • ARGOS-1499 - Message shouldn’t scroll left and right
  • ARGOS-1522 - Password with length 1 can be used
  • ARGOS-1525 - “markAsRead” should not be called for drafts and sent messages
  • ARGOS-1598 - No thumbnails in IE
  • ARGOS-1621 - Events before 1970
  • ARGOS-1645 - Can’t create a recurring event prior to the year 2000
  • ARGOS-1653 - DND Highlights events
  • ARGOS-1675 - There is ability to move and edit read only events
  • ARGOS-1676 - Public view shows time for all-day events

This morning I found out the Zimbra is now offering their product in the cloud. Zapatec has been offering 6zap from day one in the cloud, so I was curious to see what Zimbra offers.
It turns out that Yahoo who owns Zimbra is launching its own cloud computing platform on top of which the product will be offered. It also seems that it’s going to be more of a hosted solution than real cloud computing. With 6zap you launch the AMI on Amazon. We don’t have access to that AMI, and unlike a standard hosted solution can’t touch or see your data.
Additionally, where 6zap is open to anyone, the Zimbra offering is only for academic institutions

According to Cnet gmail just launched a new feature: Canned responses which sound quite similar to 6zap’s email templates. Basically, if you find that you send the same email often, you just save it as a template, and then just choose that email from the template folder, and compose a new email. Gmail’s canned responses are similar but with an uglier name.

VentureBeat had a nice writeup about 6zap today, “Zapatec takes on established email solutions with 6zap.”
While I found the posting a little too focused on the email side of 6zap, ignoring some of the very nice features we have in the calendar and contacts modules, Anthony certainly got the main advantage of 6zap. As he says:

From a user perspective, 6zap looks solid, if unremarkable — built using the
Ajax framework, 6zap’s basic layout is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Its
drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to sort through emails, and it has most
of the normal features you expect. But 6zap’s real advantage is on the backend.
With relatively easy-to-use dropdown menus, administrators can set up new
accounts, customize the layout and add company branding. That makes the process
much easier and cheaper than setting up (for example) a Microsoft Exchange
server, because companies don’t need to hire an IT person to tailor 6zap to
their needs.

I’m happy and excited to announce that the initial, beta, version of 6zap is now available.
While this is, a beta, I’m impressed with how solid it is and the advanced features that we have. Mainly when you consider that everyone’s used to apps from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft that have many tens, if not hundreds of developers working on.

Of course, a big part of what we’re doing is to provide 6zap as an Amazon AMI, but I’ll touch on that in a followup posting. Here I’m going to focus on functionality that you can see in 6zap when you signup on www.6zap.com.

For the most part we tried to make things work the way you’d expect them to. You move between your email, calendar and contacts module, without loosing the context of where you last were. Never understood why google decided that if you click on calendar in gmail, it opens a new tab.

In the modules themselves, we went with familiar interfaces. For email, for instance, it’s the three pane approach. Click on an email message and it shows on the bottom, drag and drop messages to folders, right click on a message to delete, reply, forward or print it. In the calendar drag on a time range to create an event, drag and drop events to move them around, create recurring events, etc.

The list of features is really long, but I don’t really need to list these, since it’s mostly what you expect.

So, is everything perfect? Far from it. We’re first going to nail down the features that bring us on par with the big guys, and then we’ll go right pass them :-). Here are some of known main known issues that we have in the current, 0.13 version.

* Search is slow in the E-mail module. We’ll speed it up by indexing all mail.
* Need to be able to import contacts from Outlook and other sources. You can import into the calendar though it sometimes chokes on complex calendars.
* Spam filtering works, but there’s no way to “educate” the filter. Moving things into/from the spam folder doesn’t provide feedback to the spam backend.
* We’ve got issues with E-mail notifications for recurring events

Now that 6zap is out in the wild, we hope to get tons of feedback and find out what other issues you people are running into and what other features you’d like to see.

This morning we froze version 0.13.1. This should be the last version we freeze before the final public Beta. It’s mostly small bug fixes, but we did find an ugly IE7 formatting issue in Compose Email.
That’s what testing is about :-). Formal launch of the public beta is planned for Tuesday September 30. Lots of things to do till then.

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Check out the demo at http://email.zapatec.net and see for yourself the flexibility and power of the Zapatec AJAX Email Client.

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I’m happy to announce the availability of the Zapatec AJAX Events Calendar, an advanced single-page, multi-user, internationalized online calendar.
The Calendar is available both as a stand alone product and a library that you can embed in your application.
Purchase the Calendar before March 1 and receive 15 hours of consulting and customization — a $1500 benefit.

Sign up for an account and see for yourself the flexibility and power of the Zapatec Events Calendar.

The Calendar is a true AJAX single page application where all operations are done via AJAX without refreshing the page. Features * Simple and Intuitive user interface: events are created by dragging the cursor or clicking and are easily moved using drag and drop. * The calendar supports day, week and month view for easy customization. * Create multiple calendars * Create recurring events * Share your calendars with your friends deciding the level of access they have * Customize the Calendar choosing the date and time formats, first day of the week and more. * Cross browser compatible — works in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari * Available as a stand alone AJAX front end or with either PHP or Java backend. A .NET backend * Full separation between the AJAX front end and the backend using a well documented JSON API accessible also to developers * Set multiple reminders in the Calendar and be alerted by either an alert or email. * And lots more

Sign up for an account to see for yourself the flexibility of the Zapatec Events Calendar.

Feel free to contact our sales department at sales@zapatec.com or 1-866-522-7941.

And don’t forget, purchase the Calendar before March 1 2008 and receive 15 hours of consulting and customization — a $1500 benefit.