Some interop questions with Exchange

[digitaldan]

Hi all, I have been using zimbra personally for 2+ years and have loved it.

At the office however we are using Exchange which is not working for my engineering department who are all on Linux boxes. I have started a pilot with a few users to get the latest Zimbra running in parallel with exchnage with the idea that we would eventually move the whole team over. I have been using this board and the wiki as a guide but I do have a few questions.

For the record my setup is using active directory for external authorization, the exchange server as its outbound smtp relay, IMAP and fetchmail to pull email off the exchange server and the free/busy interop feature (which I only have working one way, zimbra can see free/busy but not push).

1. Password expiration on active directory side. Is there any good way of detecting this in zimbra?

2. Fetchmail and passwords: Right now I have a text file containing a line for each users fetchmail job which includes the users password. This file is edited by hand by me, is there a better way of doing this? I would like mail from the exchange account to be processed through the zimbra smtp engine for spam, filters, etc... Is there something we can do on the exchange side?

3. Resource booking on the exchnage server: I can see if exchange resources (rooms) are busy in zimbra but if I include a room in the list of attendees exchange does not seem to accept or deny the invite and will show the resource as unbooked afterwords. An thoughts?

4. Has anyone else managed to get Zimbra to push free/busy data to exchange?

Thanks
Dan-

[JLee]

Hi Dan. Here are some of the answers and thoughts.

2. Are you currently letting the emails for Zimbra users to be delivered to Exchange, then use IMAP to pull them into Zimbra mailbox? You may want to consider setting up MTA level filter on the exchange and have the emails destined for Zimbra users to be forwarded to Zimbra MTA. That way the emails will go through standard spam and av checks before being delivered.

4. First of all, you need the Zimbra user objects in AD to have mailboxes disabled. If the mailboxes are enabled in AD, then Exchange will subsequently overwrite f/b information that we push from Zimbra with f/b calculated using calendar appointment in the mailbox. AD contact object works the best. In the previous testing users who previously had Exchange mailbox, then mailbox disabled did not work as well. When we turn off mailbox for a user in AD, Exchange modifies various LDAP attributes in AD that we need for f/b interop, and the user will no longer show up in GAL search and Zimbra couldn't push f/b to the user. There might be a way to keep the mail enabled, and turn off just the mailbox for a user, but I couldnt' find a way.

[digitaldan]

Thanks JLee, that's interesting. I don't think disabling accounts is an option, we need other AD users to see these in the GAL. So it sounds like free busy is just not an option here. We also have Cisco voice mail integration with exchange so I need mail enabled for these users (I don't think making them an contact is an option).

I will talk to my Exchange admin about the mail forwarding.

If anyone else has experience here I would appreciate feedback.

Thanks
D-

Hi Dan. Here are some of the answers and thoughts.

2. Are you currently letting the emails for Zimbra users to be delivered to Exchange, then use IMAP to pull them into Zimbra mailbox? You may want to consider setting up MTA level filter on the exchange and have the emails destined for Zimbra users to be forwarded to Zimbra MTA. That way the emails will go through standard spam and av checks before being delivered.

4. First of all, you need the Zimbra user objects in AD to have mailboxes disabled. If the mailboxes are enabled in AD, then Exchange will subsequently overwrite f/b information that we push from Zimbra with f/b calculated using calendar appointment in the mailbox. AD contact object works the best. In the previous testing users who previously had Exchange mailbox, then mailbox disabled did not work as well. When we turn off mailbox for a user in AD, Exchange modifies various LDAP attributes in AD that we need for f/b interop, and the user will no longer show up in GAL search and Zimbra couldn't push f/b to the user. There might be a way to keep the mail enabled, and turn off just the mailbox for a user, but I couldnt' find a way.