best practice: grouping shared calendars

[bdial]

we're evaluating zimbra netwokr edition, and one of the features we plan to use extensively is the shared calendar. however, instead of just having a few dozen shared calendars in one long list in the left hand pane, we were going to try to group them.

When I started playing with this, the first idea I had was that I created a dummy user called HRGroup. I shared that calendar with the test users user1 user2 and user3 who are part of the distribution group hr@domain.com. I then did a createmountpoint for each of the users mounting the HRGroup calendar as /HR Dept. It was shared with rwid permissions so each person could add/remove stuff from their department calendar.

I then shared each of the userX's calendar with the hr@domain.com group with r permission so they coudl see their coworker's claendars. I then created a mountpoint for each person's calendar as /HR Dept/userX in their coworker's calendar.

This gave me a expandable/collapsable grouping which for user3 looked like this

> HR Dept
..........user1
..........user2

However, I found that trying to select user1 or user2's calendar gave me a permission error. I dind't get this error if i mounted the same share at the root of the namespace so I figured that mounting one shared calendar under another shared calendar just wasn't good practice and was probably causing zimbra to freak.

oh well, back to the drawing board.

If i couldn't mount one shared calendar inside anotehr, I'd try mounting many shared calendars under one personal calendar. So for each of the userX I did a createfolder /HR Dept. Then again, I mounted each of the other users under that. This gave me the same expandable and collapsable grouping, and now I could select the individual users and I could see their calendars. Of course now /HR Dept is not a "group calendar" because it is local to each person, but I might rename it to just Coworkers and have a separate HR Dept shared calendar at the root. I did notice though that it did not save the checkbox for displaying the calendars of the children of the group (the userX's) between sessions, only the top level HR Dept. This will probably become a bug report

Has anyone else tried this? Can an employee or someone say what the best practice is for doing something like this?

[mmorse]

Bug 5997 - calendar subfolders can disappear seeps to be outstanding still
Vote on Bug 8765 - Allow hierarchical organization of calendars into subfolders on Zimbra web client & Bug 6410 - departmental calendar grouping

[Rich Graves]

I thought those issues were fixed as part of Bug 20931 - Groupwise Appointments not visible in Web Client after Migration (related to 20278)

Can you still reproduce disappearing calendar subfolders under 5.0?

bdial: Depends what use is going to be made of those shared calendars. Unless they are mostly empty, I can't imagine that a page with "dozens" of calendars overlaid is going to be very usable. Consider not making mountpoints at all. Instead, create hyperlinks to the (read-only) HTML view of the HR calendars on a publicly shared wiki page.

We're going to be doing something like that with conference room resources. Everyone needs access to check the calendar, but nobody is ever going to want to overlay it on their personal calendar.

[mmorse]

I haven't tried with outlook and what not...
-See pics calendarSub-folders.png, cantChooseWhereToCreateNewCal.png, & extraPartOfFolderName.png
-It kinda displays path wrong (shows full path) & you can't create sub-folders from the web-client yet.
-Sharing when sub-folder issue mentioned above.
-Checkbox state doesn't keep
Command line: zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com cf --view appointment /Calendar/subtest

[bdial]

I will be doing most of the creation through scripting. when a new employee is hired and added to a specific department, all the other members of that department will be automaticly mounted as

/Coworkers/<Coworker Name>

likewise, this new person's calendar will automaticly be mounted into all the existing employee's calendars. i'm not too concerned about people needing to do this on thier own.

This thread was created mostly for just figuring out if I was doing it the way that was going to cause the least amount of problems. As I said, my first attempt at mounting one shared calendar as a child of another shared calendar blew up in my face so I wanted to see if anyone else had gone my 2nd route and encountered problems.

Rich Graves is right, rarely will people want all of the people in their department to be actively displayed all the time, but i'm sure a secretary will ask me how she can always have her boss' appointments overlayed onto hers and not have to select it every time

This might be a dead end anyway. As we're pretty unsure if we'll be able to pry outlook away from the deathgrip a lot of users have on it, we're going to have to design things to work in outlook as well. I just checked, and shared calendars mounted under a personal calendar do not show up at all in outlook.

[Rich Graves]

It Has Been Decided here that "all administrative users will demand Outlook 2007." We magically determined that without actually asking anyone, and without demoing the web client.

If anyone can figure out how to script the process of mounting shares in Outlook, in any language, I'm *very* interested. Here's how to do manually: ZCS Connector How to mount/open a share - Zimbra :: Wiki

[bdial]

you're a step ahead of me it seems. i'm just now realizing that shared mounts you setup in the web client don't make it to outlook looks like we have some strategizing to do.

[marinew]

Hello bdial,

I am also very interested by the subject : see the one I posted here and here.

I also consider mounting others calendar folders in subfolders, to give secretary the ability to view and manage serveral calendars. So, I would be very pleased if you could post your feedback here, if you encounter some issues or not. I will do the same when I test it on my own.

Thanks.
Marine

[marinew]

Hello,

Back on this subject : I installed Zimbra 5.0.1, and created calendar subfolders through CLI.
Do you know if a bug was created for "Checkbox state doesn't keep" problem ? I searched in bugzilla, but I didn't find some. Or maybe it was solved in the last version (5.0.2) ?

Thanks.

EDIT : I created the bug in bugzilla, and I explained how to fix it, for those that would like to fix it themselves, before it is officially released : Bug 24535 - Check state and color Calendar subolders problem at startup

[bdial]

I had made a bug report as well but yours is good

Bug 24295 - Deep mounted shared calendar does not maintain 'on' status