Yahoo’s new division, Zimbra, today announced that educational institutions will now have access to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite without having to manage on-premise software and hardware. This opens access to a global collaboration cloud to best meet the needs of educational institutions, Zimbra explained.

With more than 400 educational institutions already using the communication software provided by Zimbra, the company found the need to offer even more choices and flexibility.

“Zimbra is the partner of choice with the only open collaboration solution on the market that is built from the ground up to offer both on-site and hosted options,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo vice-president. “With the new Zimbra Hosted, we have removed the challenge of managing thousands of mailboxes and encouraged schools to rebrand Zimbra as their own, creating a communications portal that connects all key audiences.”

Zimbra Hosted comes to the aid of students, universities, staff and alumni by offering control over a wide set of options which enables schools to create a communications hub around Zimbra, mobile access on a wide variety of handsets, special packages (Outlook Sync, Apple sync, BlackBerry and more), group scheduling calendar, offline access to Zimbra desktop, and much more.

In early 2007, Zimbra was one of the companies selected by Comcast to build its SmartZone service, a central location where the customers are able to send and receive email, check voicemail online, send instant messages and manage a new address book.

Last year, Yahoo announced the acquisition of Zimbra for $350 million. In July this year, the new Zimbra Desktop Beta launched by Yahoo offered the 263 million Yahoo Mail users offline access to their mail and calendar accounts.