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Yahoo's Zimbra, the provider of a communications and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange, will make its cloud computing debut on Tuesday.Zimbra has so far relied entirely on third-party hosting partners to offer the SaaS (software-as-a-service) version of its suite.However, it is now taking advantage of Yahoo's data centers to become a hosting provider for customers in the education market that want to access the suite on demand.

Thanks to the powerful technology that our Zimbra team built, and our involvement with the online calendaring community, we’ve been able to add some much-improved technical functionality to the new Yahoo! Calendar. Now you can better connect with your friends and family –- even those who aren’t using Yahoo! Calendar. Our new calendar is interoperable with the other popular services, including those from Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google, so you can share your upcoming plans and important dates with friends.

Subscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar.

So if you’re looking to be even more connected with your friends and family and never miss an important appointment, sign up for the Yahoo! Calendar beta at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com. We’ll be adding users from this list over the next few weeks. And check out this screencast of the new Yahoo! Calendar, narrated by our product manager Herbert Wang.

Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn't just targeting data center servers, although that's on its list.

The plan is for VARs (value added resellers) and system integrators to brand the complete package under their own names.

On the surface SharePoint is merely a document management system which lets everyone in your company share and find Office documents easily. But critics like our own Matt Asay call it a Trojan Horse, which will bind companies which deploy it to Microsoft forever. You can put together everything SharePoint does using open source projects, but it takes work. You can combine Alfresco (from the Electronic Content Management (ECM) software company Matt works for), the Liferay portal, JasperSoft for reporting, and Zimbra’s e-mail server. Throw in some Jive forums and you’re more than done. But what does that cost, really, compared to just using something from Microsoft which already works with your current Office applications? Exactly. Once companies start using SharePoint, Asay worries, there is no way for them to ever ditch Microsoft applications and file formats. SharePoint is tied to those formats, and as the share fills the cost of switching away rises exponentially.

Google's long-awaited offline access for Gmail is here, bringing a sigh of relief to users of Google's messaging and collaboration software. Google Apps Standard Edition users will be able to access it immediately with a few steps, while consumers will see a more gradual rollout. The move should put Google on a more level playing field in cloud computing versus Microsoft, Yahoo Zimbra, Zoho and others with e-mail clients that already provide offline access.