SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CREATING AN EFFICIENT AND SCALABLE CACHE MODE FOR A COLLABORATION SUITE APPLICATION

• US 20090234911A1
• Filed: 03/14/2008
• Published: 09/17/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 03/14/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Vmware LLC (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Khavari, Sam
• Granted Patent: US 9,262,750 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/203
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/107 Computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/568 Storing data temporarily at an intermediate stage, e.g. caching

Abstract

A system and method for creating a cached mode is created for some applications, such as for use with BES. Operations on the mailbox items are conducted off the cache, rather than off the collaboration suite server itself, thus reducing the load on the collaboration suite server. According to one aspect of the present invention, a filtered initial synchronization is performed with the cache in the client device to further reduce the load on the collaboration suite server as well as the required bandwidth. In one embodiment of the present invention, mailbox items on the local cache are periodically reaped so as to not over-burden the disk space in the client device. In one embodiment of the present invention, mailbox items not present in the cache can be requested on-demand from the collaboration suite server.

Claims

1. A system for reducing the load on a collaboration suite server for a collaboration suite application being used on a plurality of user devices, the system comprising:

the collaboration suite server on which data for a plurality of mailboxes are stored, the plurality of mailboxes corresponding to the plurality of user devices; and

a user device synchronization machine for synchronizing data with each of the plurality of user devices, the user device synchronization machine including a plurality of caches for storing data for a corresponding one of the plurality of mailboxes, wherein each of the plurality of user devices is synchronized with the corresponding one of the plurality of caches.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein data on each of the plurality of caches is a subset of the data for the corresponding one of the plurality of mailboxes on the collaboration suite server.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the user device synchronization machine comprises:

a user device synchronization server for synchronizing with the plurality of user devices;

a collaboration suite synchronization client for communicating with the collaboration suite server; and

a program interface using which the user device synchronization server communicates with the collaboration suite synchronization client.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein the plurality of caches is a part of the collaboration suite synchronization client.

5. The system of claim 3, wherein the user device synchronization server is a BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

6. The system of claim 3, wherein the collaboration suite synchronization client communicates with the collaboration suite server using a first network, and the user device synchronization server communicates with the user devices using a second network.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the first network is the Internet.

8. The system of claim 6, wherein the second network is a wireless phone network.

9. The system of claim 3, wherein the collaboration suite synchronization client comprises:

a program interface for communicating with the collaboration suite server;

a plurality of caches for storing data for synchronization with the corresponding one of the plurality of user devices; and

a synchronizer for synchronizing data in each of the plurality of caches with the corresponding data on the collaboration suite server.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein the collaboration suite synchronization client further comprises:

a secondary synchronizer.

11. The system of claim 9, wherein the collaboration suite synchronization client further comprises:

a reaper for removing data from the plurality of local caches; and

an on-demand fetcher for requesting from the collaboration suite server data which is not on the plurality of local caches.

12. The system of claim 1, wherein the collaboration suite application is a Zimbra Collaboration Suite application.

13. A method for minimizing time taken to populate mailbox data on a plurality of user devices, the mailbox data initially residing on a collaboration suite server, the method comprising:

performing a filtered initial synchronization to synchronize mailbox data for a plurality of mailboxes on the collaboration suite server with a plurality of caches; and

synchronizing the data in each of the plurality of caches with the corresponding one of the plurality of user devices.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising:

performing secondary sychronization while the filtered initial synchronization is ongoing.

15. The method of claim 13, further comprising:

periodically reaping to remove a subset of the data in each of the plurality of caches.

16. The method of claim 14, wherein the periodic reaping is transparent to the plurality of user devices.

17. The method of claim 13, wherein operations requested by a user of one of the plurality of user devices are performed on data in the corresponding one of the plurality of caches.

18. The method of claim 16, wherein the operations consist of one of searching and sorting mailbox items.

19. The method of claim 13, wherein the step of progressively synchronizing comprises:

providing a notification when data in one of the plurality of mailboxes is modified.

20. The method of claim 19, further comprising:

obtaining as needed, data not currently stored in the cache from the collaboration suite server.

21. A method for reducing the load on a collaboration suite server for a collaboration suite application, wherein multiple users have user devices using the collaboration suite client, the method comprising:

performing a filtered initial synchronization to synchronize mailbox items from a plurality of mailboxes for each of the plurality of users on the collaboration suite server with a plurality of caches;

progressively synchronizing the mailbox items for each of the plurality of users on the collaboration suite server with the plurality of caches;

periodically reaping the plurality of caches to eliminate a subset of the mailbox items on the plurality of caches; and

obtaining on-demand, a mailbox item not currently stored in one of the plurality of caches from the corresponding one of the plurality of mailboxes on the collaboration suite server.