How to make entries in the global address book?

[jannik.sueltz]

I what to use Zimbra as your central LDAP-Server, so I selected "internal GAL" for your domain.
But how to make entries in the global address book? If a user create a new contact no other users can see the contact. But we like to share contact via the GAL for all accounts ...

[KevinH]

Well the internal GAL means just Zimbra users. If you want non-zimbra user's in there you'd hae to create them as accounts. In general the GAL feature is for local user's. Some people have set up an external LDAP which will host their shared contacts.

[justinp]

We need a global addressbook which is writeable for all users.

Is there a plan to add this feature?


regards
justin

ps: a global calender would be nice too...

[KevinH]

We think this can be done today by just adding users to LDAP with ldapadd. Not something that all user's can write to but at least in the mean time. It seems if enough people need a global address book then we'll add it on our TODO list, same goes for the global calendar.

[wdimmit]

The lack of a global address book and / or calender is holding me back from deploying (or getting ready to deploy) Zimbra in two places. Are there RFE's for these already (I couldn't find any in bugzilla)?

[KevinH]

I don't see it either. Feel free to enter them and post enough details about how you expect it to work. Or the use cases of you you expect users to use it.

[jonnyRo]

Originally Posted by KevinH

We think this can be done today by just adding users to LDAP with ldapadd. Not something that all user's can write to but at least in the mean time. It seems if enough people need a global address book then we'll add it on our TODO list, same goes for the global calendar.

A global shared contact list is especially useful in a small business environment.

Having named shared contact lists would also be awesome, like sharing calendars with other users.

[Kavey]

We're extremely interested in this too. We're currently debating switching to Zimbra, and the lack of public contact folders (or any kind of public folders for that matter) is a big point keeping us from migrating.

[hootjr29]

I'm interested in this too. I see that I can "share" a calendar. But I have not seen a way of "sharing" a contact list. Or at least creating a Global Address List from the admin UI and making it available to everyone without necessarily having them be a user.

[Kirkaiya]

I have been looking at Zimbra since late November, when I read about it in an eWeek (I think?). Right now, we have >150 users still on POP3/SMTP, and I have a mandate to move everyone to Exchange, or another collaboration suite (the regional directors of the company only know about Exchange, but they're open to anything that meets their needs).

BUT - and this is a big but - having some sort of centralized, shared contacts list is a must. Ideally, this would be part of the implementation of shared folders, but even just a specific feature where our sales-people can add in details of potential customers, and ops people can list vendors, and tag them using Zimbra tags, would be fine.

We could then use the soap interface to sync selected contacts (by tag, or folder, possibly) with other systems we have, and are implementing this year (order-entry systems, ACCPAC and Solomon accounting, etc).

Anyway - is there now any estimate of when public folders or a shared, global contacts list (of not-just-Zimbra-accounts) will be added? If it's in the next 3 - 5 months, I really want to know!.

Kirk