Zimbra, the collaborative webmail and calendar company that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007, has launched a new product for academic institutions called Zimbra Hosted that will allow schools to run their webmail portals from the “cloud”. Previously schools would have to run Zimbra’s service onsite or through third party hosting companies; now Zimbra will also give them the hassle-free option of letting Zimbra and Yahoo maintain the servers.

Zimbra currently serves over 400 academic institutions. Earlier this year the company scored a major win over Google and Microsoft Exchange (which also offer a suite of competing services) when it was chosen by Stanford as its Email/Calendar management system for students. At the time, we noted that Zimbra was especially strong for its mobile support as well as enterprise-level features.