Three other unobvious features of Zimbra Collaboration Suite that will help increase employee productivity

Our past story about the hidden features of Zimbra that may be useful to web client users has been warmly received by our readers. In this regard, we will continue to acquaint you with not the most obvious, but extremely useful features of the Zimbra web client, which can help you and employees at your enterprises to increase labor productivity, as well as greatly simplify communication within the company.

Create a meeting based on the letter you received

One of the most important functions of any collaboration system is the business calendar and the daily planner, which are used to plan working hours and schedule appointments and meetings. However, despite the rich functionality of Zimbra in terms of managing business calendars, often many instructions come to the old-fashioned managers, in the form of an e-mail with an instruction to do something or come to the office at the designated time. To prevent this order from being lost, it would be most reasonable to add it to your schedule right after receipt. But can this be done quickly so as not to open the second tab and switch between them in attempts to copy the text of the letter into the form to create a meeting or task?



Especially for this, in Zimbra there are the functions “Create a meeting” and “Create a task”, which can be found in the pop-up menu of any email. After clicking on the “Create a meeting” item, a meeting will be automatically created with the name completely repeating the subject of the letter. Also, all participants in the correspondence will be added to this meeting, and the description of the meeting will be automatically filled with the text of the selected letter. Thus, the employee will only have to indicate the place and time of the meeting, and also, if desired, slightly change its description and name if the subject and text of the letter are not suitable for these purposes. If there were attachments in the letter, they are also automatically attached to the created meeting. Roughly the same thing will happen when creating a task. Its name and description will be automatically filled on the basis of the subject and text of the letter, and the user will only have to fill in the empty columns. As a result, the task will appear in the diary of the user who created it, regardless of how many people participate in the correspondence.



Thanks to this technique, the employee gets the opportunity to optimize the time spent on creating meetings and tasks, which means that he will have time to do more tasks during the working day.

Adding RSS feeds to Zimbra

Many business managers often have to browse through numerous news feeds to keep abreast of various events and news, whether it’s global, federal, regional or even corporate news. However, if an employee opens several tabs in the browser to complete this task and constantly switches between them in search of useful information, then most likely he will not be able to view the news normally or work normally? What to do in such cases?



In such cases, good old RSS feeds, which, as a rule, contain all the necessary information and do not contain pictures and advertisements, will be of great help. Thanks to this, RSS feeds are much easier to understand and allow employees who are forced to monitor the flow of information to work more efficiently. Another significant advantage of RSS is that they can be added directly to the Zimbra web client and due to this you can view feeds without being distracted from work mail.



In order to add RSS feed to Zimbra you need to click on the gear icon in the “Mail Folders” item and select “New Folder” in the pop-up menu. There you need to check the box “Subscribe to RSS / ATOM feed” and indicate the link that contains the RSS you need. After that, you will have a folder with the created RSS feed, in which each news is displayed as a separate email.

Switching the view of correspondence

In recent years, email clients have begun to display conversations in the form of conversations. Thanks to this, all business correspondence looks very concise and there is no sensation of mess when viewing it. In addition, such a structure of correspondence allows you to most conveniently familiarize yourself with its contents and quickly refresh the conversation history. However, when a dialogue is conducted between three or more people, situations often arise when the dialogues become quite branchy and finding a separate letter in such correspondence becomes extremely problematic.

In such situations, switching to the classic form of displaying correspondence can help, in which the entire correspondence is displayed as separate messages, sorted by date of receipt. Often in this type of dialogue display it is much easier to find the letter you need, which implies a significant saving of time for the employee who is looking for it. Also, for many users, displaying correspondence in the form of separate messages can be much more convenient and more familiar than displaying in the form of conversations.



Switching between these two types of display is carried out in the drop-down menu "View" in the upper right corner of the incoming mail. Here you can not only set the display type “By Conversations” and “By Messages”, but also configure other display options for incoming mail. For example, you can sort messages by size, subject, attachment, and so on. It can also help improve employee productivity with email.

We hope that these features will help increase productivity and your employees too!

For all questions related to the Zextras Suite, you can contact the representative of the company "Zextras" Katerina Triandafilidi by e-mail katerina@zextras.com