Sorry for being a bit late in the response here - Zimbra just works so fine most of the time, I seldom have to come back here to look for troubleshooting help...
Directory Utility
As for the
Directory Utility setup, I can't recall where I got the info -- if from anywhere in particular, but I'll try to retrace my steps (as I don't really want to mess up my system by removing and re-adding the Zimbra LDAP entry from the directory list, sorry):
- Open Directory Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/)
- Click the padlock, if locked, to enable editing
- Click Show Advanved Settings
Here is the part I am sorry I don't really remember how I got to... I'll describe how it looks for me now, and first list how I believe I got it to work:
- Click on the Services tab/button
- Click on LDAPv3
- Click the pencil icon
- Click on Show options triangle
- Click the New... button
- Enter the URL to your Zimbra installation (rather, just the server FQDN)
- Select/Deselect options according to your needs [size="1"](I use SSL; I don't use LDAP for authentication, but I do use it for contacts)
- Click on Continue
- Ensure that LDAP Mappings are set to Open Directory Server, and that you enable authentication with appropriate username/password
- I made no changes in Search Base suffix or mappings, I think...
Ok, that's about it. If there are steps I've forgotten, they can't be all that important, as they at least haven't made any impact on the settings I can see in the Directory Utility now.
If you have any trouble, I'd just do the first six steps above, and then go to the manual mode, and edit the rest there:
In the Edit... window, ensure that the Connection settings are according to your needs, that in the Search & Mappings tab it tells LDAP to access Zimbra using Open Directory Server, and that the user account settings in the Security tab is correct.
Re: Original post
As for my original question, the most basic features kind of work now. When I now enter my colleague's complete email address and click
Available Meeting Times..., I
do get his (only guys working here, so far) busy/free calender alongside my own. And this works great for scheduling meetings.
What is still missing is a working auto-completion of valid email addresses in the
attendees field of the edit-an-appointment in iCal, and (I guess completely correlated) searching for users (or anything, really) in the Address Panel of iCal. The first of these shows signs of trying to do some searching/lookup/auto-completion, but fails to give me any response. The Address Panel says
Open Directory Lookup, but after spending amillisecond (ca.) searching, it just says
0 people...
Auto-completion of email addresses from the GAL works just fine when composing an email in Mail.app , and the Directory lookup works great in the Address Book, so this seems to be an iCal-thing.
I guess I'll be submitting a feature request/bug report to Apple on this when I get some spare time on my hands, as it seems this is related to how the lookup in iCal works. Unless someone can tell me that this is a Zimbra hickup?
Oh, and we have now been using Zimbra hosted by Telsys, since right after that first post of mine, and it works for the most part just great. I had a problem with CalDAV syncing when one of the calendars had a space in its name, and iCal doesn't always(?) show the events in the calendars that are shared with me. But, other than that, it's solid. 
And I'm sorry that I obviously have never learned to write short and concisely...