Thanks for the reply, Protack. My experience with both Zimbra and Exchange is an an end user. I'd like to be able to like Zimbra more than I do, but I can't. It is really the difference between a program having bugs, and a buggy program. By "program" I mean the net user experience in the client for Outlook/Exchange and Zimbra web client/ZCS since the back-end is invisible to me (and for Zimbra the browser is an extra variable which could be the source of a problem).
I'm no fan of Microsoft and of course TCO is a huge issue, but in my experience, Outlook works well and I don't know of any specific bugs that I need to think about when using it (I recall an earlier version that would hang trying to download an attachment that didn't have an extension--I had to modify my UNIX script so at least I wouldn't hang my own Outlook session).
As for the specific issues I mentioned, I was just trying to pick short easy ones that I though fell into the various categories I mentioned. So, it isn't a matter of one or two or five or ten issues, but dozens. It is a mystery to me how "size:1111b" could work in your installation and not work in the one here.
I'm a technical person, and support a variety of users, hence, I consider things an issue if I think it may be confusing or misleading for less technical users. Here's more issues I've encountered in 5.0.8 through 5.0.15 (since June last year) which have been logged in an internal wiki where support people have been discussing our Zimbra implementation. Summarized when possible. I may note things that have been fixed by 5.0.15 since there are so many I haven't the time to see if every issue noted since 5.0.8 has been fixed. Also, primarily tested with Windows XP/Vista and Firefox 3, but having encountered an issues I often also test with Safari/IE on Windows, and Safari/FF on Mac OS X.
I don't expect anyone to read them all, so let me indicate a couple of highlights. And, as previous mentioned, these are all in the course of using Zimbra, not testing it (although (41) is an exception; as is (5) since I don't have any folders with more than 100 subfolders, but I support users who do). Up to (56) there are 3 data loss bugs (14, 41, 45). Some items are trivial label issues like (47) and (56)--not getting a label correct screams sloppy, and the inaccuracy of (56) seems dangerously misleading. Item (53) is one of the most bizarre bugs I've ever seen in any program.
e-mail
1) switching signatures usually works but may not sometimes (e.g. IE7 and HTML signatures; a previously saved draft; deletion of white space between body & signature)
2) opening an e-mail message does not cause it to be marked a read
3) Compose, click "To:", get "address selection dialog", "Show names from" pick list is set to "Global Address List", error message "Not all results were returned (too many results were found). Please be more specific in your search criteria." The list appears to display up to 100 entries. It is not apparent why there are greyed out "Previous" and "Next" buttons below the list if they can't be used to navigate through the search results.
4) Contacts don't have to have an e-mail address. Compose, click "To:", get "address selection dialog", "Show names from" pick list is set to "Contacts". Contacts with no e-mail address will appear as a blank row in the list. If the entire page of 100 entries is such contacts, the page will say ""No results found."
5) Folder with >100 subfolders. Advanced search/"Folders" filter, 100 folders will be displayed followed by "+ Show remaining folders." Clicking on "+ Show remaining folders" does nothing. Click on the check box to include all the hidden folders in the search... you get "Unable to parse the search query" error message.
6) If your preference is set to "Always compose in new window" and you use a keyboard shortcnt (N, C, N M) to compose a new message, a new window is not opened. Apparently "always" means something different to the Zimbra than to normal English speakers.
7) Usually when you delete a Mail folder, the folder is moved to the Trash folder and the Trash folder is expanded, possibly changing the scroll position of the folder pane. However, the behaviour isn't consistent. Another behaviour that occurs randomly is the folder-delete operation collapses all expanded folders in the folder pane. Also, when this collapse occurs it also collapses all expanded folders in the other applications (normally expanded folders are remembered when you switch between applications). A common trait of this behaviour today is it occurs consistently when deleting folders containing at least several hundred unread messages and a total of over 1000 messages. This random close-all-folders behaviour has also been observed when permanently deleting folders from the Trash.
8) If you receive a message from "Filemaker, Inc." then Zimbra displays it as, "Inc. Filemaker."
9) New-folder dialog-box-behaviour bugs. Suppose you have a hierarchy of Mail folders with lots of branches and leaves, and you are adding new leaf folders. If you have a particular folder open in Mail, and you click the "New Folder" button, the open folder will be the default parent for the new folder. If you right-click on a folder and select "New Folder" then that folder will be the parent of the new folder. If you click the "New Folder" button after you've right-clicked to create a new folder, then it remembers the folder and the scroll position. Now for the bugs: 1) if you decide, why not use the keyboard (N F=New Folder) instead of mousing to the "New Folder" button... the window still remembers the scroll position, but the top-level folder is selected, not the previously selected folder, and 2) suppose you've opened the new folder window and either Zimbra has changed the parent folder, or you change the parent folder, or you change the scroll position, then click the "Cancel" button... the next time you open the new folder window, Zimbra will remember what you thought were the cancelled scroll position/folder selection.
10) It may be a site specific issue, but my e-mail account has: e-mail batch imported by IT from an old e-mail system, as well as via Thunderbird/IMAP. Because I was using POP, I have duplicate e-mail messages. The body of the e-mail always has the correct date. The received date column (which is how I can sort and search) may differ by up to 2 weeks. Some messages I imported just before daylight savings time ended in November and some just after--the received times differ by 1 hour. This is an enormous head-ache for duplicate deletion.
11) If you log in to Zimbra and impatiently click on, say, the New button, before Zimbra has completely loaded it may happen that your Zimbra session may be adversely effected in some weird way. The slower your computer/browser, the more likely this is to happen.
12) Create a new message and Save Draft. Go to the Drafts folder, open that message, edit it, and Save Draft again. Now, delete that message. The message counts in the Folders pane update (Drafts--, Trash++), but the message is still there in the message list pane. You can still open the message and sent it, or if you Save Draft, it saves a new copy in the Drafts folder, and you see 2 messages there even though 1 really is in the Trash. If you delete the same message again, the message count in the Folders pane is updated again (Trash--), and you can still open the message and edit it and send it, but if you try to Save Draft this time, you get a Zimbra error ("No such message exists") and associated error stack.
calendar
13) Can't print an appointment
14) Data loss bug. Day view. Create an appointment add a note, save. Mouse over the appointment and you see the note. Open it, and the note is there. Click on the "Print Calendar" icon. Mouse press appears to work (the icon changes), but print action may not occur. Mouse over the appointment and you see the note. Open it, and the note is *GONE*. If you save, it's really gone. Cancel and it is still there.
15) Can't move an all-day item by dragging.
16) The slower the browser, the more noticable this is. In the Month view, open an item. Close the item. Quickly select another item, right click on it and you get the contextual menu. While the contextual menu is open, the Zimbra refresh will occur and the selected item will be unselected. Usually the contextual menu will be left open (occasionally it closes), but now it has no item to act on.
17) Rare but occasional feature. Week view. Click an appointment and drag it quickly (perhaps back and forth as you decide where to put it), release mouse button and the item disappears. Go to Month view and find item moved to a different week.
18) Tag a calendar item with short duration (c. 30 minutes), then the time which appeared before the tag was added and for which there was lots of space for it to be drawn, it no longer visible (it's been moved to the next line for no apparent reason).
19) Mouse over the bottom edge of calendar item and wait for the double-headed arrow to appear. Click and drag down a small amount... what appears to be 5-10 minutes... the box grows a bit. Mouse over the appointment or open the appointment and the time/duration is unchanged. Refresh or what have you, and the box goes back to the previous size (which matches the unchanged duration). If you do it again without refreshing, the box appears larger, but the double-headed arrow appears where the time says the edge is, not where the box edge is drawn.
20) Mouse over the top edge of calendar item and wait for the double-headed arrow to appear. Click and drag up or down a small amount and the bottom edge moves down; the effect is particularly pronounced with short appointments. The bottom edge may stay drawn in the wrong place, but the bottom time of the appointment hasn't changed.
21) One of the help documents titled "Making appointments" specifically says that appointments are different than (all day) events (which are both different from a meeting). Other parts of the documentation are sloppy regarding this distinction and the contextual menu that allows you to create an all day event says "New All Day Appointment."
22) If you display your calendar in the Schedule view, and you click on the "Print calendar" button, you get an offer to print the Day view and not the Schedule view.
23) If you print the calendar Day view, the hyphen that seperates the start and end times is positioned so low that it appears to be an underscore character. The cause appears to be the start and end times are formated with style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: top;" whereas the hyphen only has valign="top".
address book
24) If you create a new address book, the dialog box allows you to specify the colour and the picklist has a default colour. If you change the colour or create a top level address book, the specified or default colour will be used. If you create a nested address book, the specified colour will be used, but if you leave the colour as the default colour, then the colour of the address book's parent will be used instead of the expected default colour.
25) An address book may be made to be one of several colours (with a specific associated colour value). That colour is displayed in the address book hierarchy on the left side as well as behind the person's name in the content pane and in the editing pane. Except for grey. The grey of the address book hierarchy is colour value #BBBBBB and the grey behind the person's name is colour value #E9E9E9.
26) Suppose you import an address book entry that has just a Full Name and and e-mail address. The Full Name will be used as the title for the entry. If make any change to the address book entry, or even save it with out modifying it, the Full Name will be lost and it will appear in the Address Book as "<no name>".
27) Full Name and names in general, here are three places where you can search for a contact:
1) The search box at the top
2) The "To" field as you type
3) The search field in the "Select Addresses" dialog box
If the Full Name field contains "John Smith" then the three places to search exhibit three behaviours:
Search 1) will search the Full Name field as words. "John" or "Smith"
Search 2) will search the Full Name field as initial sub-string. "J", "Jo", ... "John Smi", but not "Smith."
Search 3) will not search the Full Name field
28) Given the same three places to search as the previous item.
Given a compound name firstname="Mary Joe" lastname="Smith":
Search 1) will find words only. "Mary Joe", "Mary", "Joe", "Smith"
Search 2) will find initial field sub-strings. "Mar", "Mary", "Mary J", "S", "Sm", but not "Joe"
Search 3) will find initial word sub-strings: Same as Search 2) plus "J", "Jo", "Joe"
29) Export Thunderbird address book/import into Zimbra. Thunderbird records have the "nickname" field populated. Search box at the top will find records based on the field, but the "To" field won't, nor will the search field in the "Select Addresses" dialog box. If you edit the record, nickname isn't a visible field in Zimbra, so you can't see the value, nor can you delete it.
30) Twenty contacts, 8 do not have an first or last name--those 8 entries appear at the beginning of the list (list view) tagged with "<No Name>." Modify the first or last name of one of the entries that does have a first name or last name and modify it in such a fashion that the contact should change its place in the sort order. The first entry in the list jumps to the 19th position in the list!
31) Sort order of the "<No Name>" entries isn't apparent.
32) Click and drag 1 contact and release the mouse button when position is invalid (red box) and the animation shows the item returning to its original positon. The item is now frozen and can't be selected or acted upon. If the box was checked, it remains checked. If you shift-select items before the frozen contact and after it, it appears to select the frozen item, but you can't perform any actions on the selected items.
33) A scrolling list of contacts may not update correctly when moving one contact up or down via the cursor keys. The behaviour in FF3 and IE7 is different. In IE7, the scroll position didn't change. In FF3, the behaviour is more complex. Given an Address Book with enough entries to add a scroll bar (the more the merrier and having the maximum (100) will make the effect more obvious), and moving to the end of the list via the cursor keys, eventually, the highlighted item will no longer be visible in the list. If you change the scroll position so that you can see the item, the next cursor move will cause the scroll bar position to move back to the wrong place. Mail and Tasks can do this correctly.
34) Import records and the sort order isn't the order they were imported, it isn't the order if sorted by last name, it isn't the order if sorted by first name, and it isn't the order if sorted by e-mail address. It appears to be the reverse of the order they were imported. If you examine each record, they all say "File As: Last, First." Also, if "Always show search string" is enabled, the search box says in:folder and it you actually do that search, then the records appear in the expected (Last Name) order. Record changes that change the sort order can also leave the records in the wrong place.
35) Contacts in the Trash can be added to a Contact Group since they appear in the "Add Members to this Group" list.
36) Contacts in the Trash do not print. Do a contact search that includes at least one record in the Trash. You will then have the opportunity to "Print selected contact(s)" and "Print Results." Regardless of whether you have selected contacts that are in the Trash or the search results contains records in the Trash, Zimbra won't print items that are in the Trash.  |