Developer Zone, Administration API, Kerio Directory... what do they have in common? It is openness, a quality I prefer both as a programmer and as a human, and a quality that we want to deliver with our products.

Kerio products have always been well-known for being open - supporting a number of platforms and protocols, and allowing you to run them with various clients, devices and third-party applications. Even though it's not always the easiest way, we believe it brings value to our customers and partners, and thus it's simply the right thing to do.

The next step to openness is the Administration API for Kerio Connect, which we designed and published in order to give you even more information and tools for managing and integrating with our products. Hand-in-hand goes Kerio Developer Zone, the new home of our API, with guides, examples, SDK, Q&A's and forums to help you with your jobs.

The API has been used by Kerio Connect's own web-based Administration for a couple of years, and the first commercial application was built on top of API's beta, which suggests the API is mature and worth trying.

As more customers and partners are deploying more than one Kerio products in one environment, they're asking not only for conveniences they like in the other product, but also for more integration features. The project to address all these requests is called Kerio Unity. Don't worry, we stick to openness, so every Kerio product will continue to work perfectly without the need to install the other products; but if you opt to use multiple Kerio products, we want the products to work in synergy to do their best for your benefit.

The most visible part of Kerio Unity is going to be Kerio Directory, a new product that is going to reach the public beta release in Q2. For small businesses who don't want to buy expensive and maintenance-demanding third-party directory services, Kerio Directory will be the simple solution providing a central user account store (LDAP-compliant) with our easy-to-use administration. And even medium businesses with a different directory service may benefit from the Kerio Unity Sign-On feature (a single sign-on solution for logging into all Kerio's web applications).

Explore our Developer Zone, or join the Kerio Directory beta forum and try the early beta.