The "cloud" grew a little more crowded today, as Yahoo announced plans to host the open source-enabled Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) in an offering specifically geared to colleges, universities, and other educational institutions.

Yahoo today introduced Zimbra Hosted for Education (EDU), a new SaaS edition of its open source e-mail and collaboration software which is tailored to partial or whole campus deployment among students, faculty, staff and alumni at educational institutions.

Zimbra -- an open source software specialist acquired by Yahoo last year -- already has about 400 customers in the education space. These schools have been running the suite in self-hosted mode, however. In contrast, with the new hosted offering, Yahoo is running ZCS in its own data centers.

The SaaS offering is aimed at school environments that want a full e-mail and collaboration suite, but would rather not provide their own hardware or manage their own administration, configuration, updates, and support.

Zimbra Hosted for EDU encompasses a 99.9% service uptime guarantee, 24/7 monitoring and support, daily back-ups, and disaster recovery.

Zimbra's e-mail and collaboration features include, for example, an Ajax-enabled mail and address book; keyword-based attachment search across .DOC, .PDF, and about 200 other attachment types; and the ability to categorize and sort messages using tags.

An instant ZCS sample account is available on the Zimbra Web site, and so is pricing information.

Could this be the start of a series of hosted offerings from Yahoo? As reported in BetaNews on Monday, Yahoo also now plans to build a new data center and customer care center in Nebraska.