Going beyond the dial tone

As some of you may have heard Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 was released last week. It includes access to Tasks, Documents, and Briefcase. It adds support for Yahoo! Mail users to access their unpaid accounts via IMAP, it allows for the Mailto: link handler to use Zimbra Desktop, and even has Growl support. You can see the full details at the Zimbra Blog.

As you are painfully aware, we are currently experiencing significant issues with one of our mail clusters, mailbox.perceiva.com. We have had engineers working since 3:30a Friday morning to resolve the issue and are making significant progress. We are in the process of restoring from out backups and are taking extra steps to ensure there is no mail corruption and once services are restored, that we will no further issues.

We do certainly realize that this has been an incredible inconvenience and I promise to work with you to find some what to attempt to make it up to you. I ask for your continued patience as we work to a resolution.

EDIT 4:00p EDT - Backups appear to be viable, restore is underway.

EDIT 9:15p EDT - Restore continues, we have about 400gb of mail to be restored in total. It is approximately 50% finished at this point from disk space calculations.

EDIT 7:00a EDT - Restore has completed. We are validating the restore, allowing the mail queue to deliver pending messages from Friday/Saturday and we will be allowing client access shortly.

EDIT 8:15a EDT - Services have been restored. A full root cause analysis is being developed and sent to customer contacts.

EDIT - Message from Greg, CEO of Perceiva -

I wanted to share my sincerest and deepest apologies for the outage experienced on mailbox.perceiva.com. There are several things that went wrong, the culmination of the perfect storm if you will. Our engineers are developing a formal root cause analysis. Once completed, we will be sending a notification all all customer contacts (those listed as the “admin” of the domain) with details on what happened, why it happened, what we are going to do to mitigate future risks and of course what we are going to do in an effort to make up for the experience we have all gone through in the last 48 hours.

We have felt there are a group of people who have not been able to take advantage of the power of Perceiva’s solution. Being a small business ourselves, we understand how critical it is to stay in touch and minimize costs at the same time.

We are pleased to announce a new Zimbra Hosting package for mobile professionals, dubbed Perceiva Mobile Professional (PMP).

With PMP, you receive 1 mailbox Zimbra Network Professional mailbox that includes 2GB of storage, advanced spam protection, Zimbra Mobile, and all other features enabled (Briefcase, Documents, To Dos, etc). The cost is: $150 a year, with no setup fee. We can even provide you with native Blackberry intergration at an additional cost. Please see our pricing page for details.

Now that you have professional e-mail, do you need a phone for your office? Perceiva also provide voice over IP done right. We include all the key features you need like caller id, music-on-hold, find-me/follow-me, and a web console to manage it, but we can also provide you with a personal conference bridge, 800 number service, auto-attendant. Pricing starts at $35/mo. Please contact us for more details.

Excellent news this evening. Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo! In a letter to Jerry Yang, CEO/Chief Yahoo, Balmer said “I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.”

This has been a three month battle which has created much buzz in the Zimbra community, generating 303 postings and over 42,000 views on the Zimbra forums

Having watched Microsoft’s attempt very closely, I am pleased they have decided to withdraw this bid. This will allow Zimbra to continue to innovate and provide a solid and reliable alternative for enterprise messaging and collaboration.

Details on the press releases can be found here and here.

For the past several years we have worked hard to maintain our connection with our customers. So today, we launch “Beyond the dial tone” that will include information regarding new services, industry trends, and even some tips and tricks to use your service to its full extent. If you have any post suggestions, be sure to let us know.

When we started Perceiva, we never imagined how successful it has become and know that has everything to do with our customers and for that, we thank you,

Greg M. Smith, CEO
Perceiva, Inc.