Open-source vendor Zimbra has been a notable pioneer in the open-source movement over the past year. Company co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj (left) was interviewed by SYS-CON.TV  about the company at LinuxWorld 2005 just as it was getting started.

This ground-breaking interview was followed up recenlty by company CTO Scott Dietzen (below left), who recently outlined the company's current vision at the recent Real-World AJAX Seminar in New York, produced by SYS-CON Events, and also provided an exclusive interview to SYS-CON.TV.

Now, Zimbra co-founder and VP of Engineering Ross Dargahi has also weighed in about the company's new product development. "Recently I had to write a document which required the inclusion of some images, a chart, and a few drawings in the text - something that modern word processors allow you to simply and readily do," writes Zimbra CTO Ross Dargahi in a recent blogpost. "In fact, the ability to embed and edit rich content directly in a document is actually a pretty handy and powerful feature; arguably one of the more important and enabling features of modern day office suites, such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office."

He continues, " What is really nice is that the embedded content is saved along with the enclosing document. So for example, if I email a document to a colleague, then the embedded objects I have included into the document follow it to their destination. This embedding capability has traditionally been enabled by leveraging component object models such as Microsoft’s COM/DCOM or IBM’s DSOM and has been the domain of fat desktop applications and office suites."

He then describes the company's new AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) product, "which provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that instead of embedding objects that are backed by installed desktop applications (e.g. a spreadsheet or drawing application), within the ALE world the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document."

The full post can be found here, along with links to other recent executive blogs at Zimbra.