[SOLVED] GAL and Distro Lists in 5.0.7NE

[jason]

We run 5.0.7NE and am setting up distribution lists. Found 2 problems that I did not expect (for clarification, we use Internal LDAP auth and have the 100 set to return for GAL):

1) GAL does not include Distro Lists

2) GAL does not provide Next/Back like 'Contacts' does, regardless of wethere I set GAL to 10, 25, or 100, for my domain. I have admin/ham/span/wiki hidden in GAL, and have 101 users right now, soon to be up to 400. I am real worried now, as I would like to set my GAL to something like 25 or 50, then let users use Next, etc....

I searched forums up and down, and most posts are from 2006 and prior on these problems. Why are they still here....

So I found to get my distros to work for now, I would have to have a display name like: @@ ISD_Staff, @@ MOT_Staff, etc.... then train my users to hit '@@' then 'search' (and all distros are returned). Naturally I would like distros to be in the GAL without being hidden.

Please let me know what's the work around on these 2 questions???

Thanks in advance for your help,

[jason]

Haven't seen any replies from Zimbra Staff, which worries me. I have initiated a ticket alraedy as part of my NE edition benefits. Nothing good has come back yet.

I find it hard to understand that when my users hit 'To' and then get the GAL (which now has several hundred usrers) with a standard 100 email accounts and NO paging (Back/Next) that this could go on sooo long?

In searching this on the forums and wiki, this has been a problem with Internal LDAP lookup since 2005 or earlier.

The stock answer is to just use the GAL to do auto searches when composing emails. That works, but why has Zimbra not refined the openLDAP lookup and made this work?

I would think that minor version upgrades shoudl come 2nd to something this problematic. How are all the large customers dealing with this? If the answer is external Auth to an LDAP db, then that would work I suppose, but what about so many of us who choose to use internal LDAP.

It seems the ball has been dropped. I am really frustrated.

Will someone in the Zimbra Camp, please comfort me and let me know that you are going to fix this???

Thanks for any replies,
Jason

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by jason

1) GAL does not include Distro Lists

It should if you un-check 'hide in gal':

Originally Posted by jason

2) GAL does not provide Next/Back like 'Contacts' does, regardless of wethere I set GAL to 10, 25, or 100, for my domain. I have admin/ham/span/wiki hidden in GAL, and have 101 users right now, soon to be up to 400. I am real worried now, as I would like to set my GAL to something like 25 or 50, then let users use Next, etc....

Originally Posted by jason

I find it hard to understand that when my users hit 'To' and then get the GAL (which now has several hundred usrers) with a standard 100 email accounts and NO paging (Back/Next) that this could go on sooo long?

I see what you're saying but permit me an explanation & this other logic mindset: It's an LDAP search, the GAL in it's current state is not intended to 'browse' it's for searching.

This is not in the 'To:' area & more for an addressbook, for example this RFE: Bug 14531 - GAL via contacts folders with sorting, browsing and real sync

You're more than welcome to file another RFE to get the next/previous buttons in the To: search to list the first x results, then use logic to remember where the first LDAP search ended and search the next x matching results. Why not just spit them all to the web-client on initial then page through them? Well LDAP searches are a performance hit (abit tiny) but this has to scale - imagine a 50,000 user GAL, you wouldn't want to be sending the web-client that many addresses every time you hit the To: button.

Originally Posted by jason

So I found to get my distros to work for now, I would have to have a display name like: @@ ISD_Staff, @@ MOT_Staff, etc.... then train my users to hit '@@' then 'search' (and all distros are returned). Naturally I would like distros to be in the GAL without being hidden.

Ok so 1) above is actually working they just don't come up in the first set of results I gather. How about prefex or suffix them '-dist' or use display names of 'dist' like you do with @@ so they're easy to find.

Originally Posted by jason

In searching this on the forums and wiki, this has been a problem with Internal LDAP lookup since 2005 or earlier.

The stock answer is to just use the GAL to do auto searches when composing emails. That works, but why has Zimbra not refined the openLDAP lookup and made this work?

There are all sorts of feature requests out there, we let people influence & shape the product everyday - that's the great part about Zimbra. Create a support ticket and have them tag it to some of the open Bugs or RFEs on the GAL to increase their weight. ("Support Incidents determined to be enhancement requests or bug reports do not count against your allotted Support Incidents." http://www.zimbra.com/support/support_overview.html)

The blog has lots of good articles - you might checkout: Open Source Product Management: How do features get into Zimbra?

[jason]

Mike,
thanks for the replies. On #1 - I do not have them hidden, so maybe you can help on this.... In the Compose Popup Window, after clicking 'To:' if all DL display names are like this: @@ ISD_staff (for example - yes there is aspace after @@), and only @@ ISD_staff shows up at the top, but the rest do not show up at all, what might cause this? Since LDAP does not return more than 100, is there an ordering issue when selecting, etc..?
------
On the GAL, Next/Back..... If I choose to only show 25 then that should not be so tough on LDAP (simple select i thought), and the 1st 25 showup, then hit next for the next 25, etc.... Looks like I'll have to get my ticket tagged for an RFE.
------
from your reply...
Ok so 1) above is actually working they just don't come up in the first set of results I gather. How about prefex or suffix them '-dist' or use display names of 'dist' like you do with @@ so they're easy to find.....>>>> Only 1 DL shows up as mentioned above, not all, so I am still working on this.
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Mike, I forget to mention that my emails for the DLs are something like 'group.dl.staff@domain.com' with the DL name of: '@@ GROUP_Staff' Would querying openLDAP have a problem with this email address in searches (or not like seeing 10 DLs with names of @@ ? Your reply shows something a whole lot simpler (dist@domain.com).

As always, thanks for your feedback.

[jason]

Mike,

Somewhere in the ADMIN manual I read that the GAL can return only 100 (and it shows so on the Admin UI). Today, I set it for 400 and Now I get every USER and EVERY Distro List. Now we have no need for Next/Back. Is this the behavior that you know Zibra to be able to do, or? My case is closed if so. Had I known I could have used this high amount, I would have never created any cases, etc.... We are using NE5.0.7.
Please let me know.
Thanks so much for your Help. We are Happy Again!!!

[mmorse]

Originally Posted by jason

Mike,
Somewhere in the ADMIN manual I read that the GAL can return only 100 (and it shows so on the Admin UI).

It should say 100 result max per query is the default - could you point me at the offending page so I can have it corrected?

Originally Posted by jason

Today, I set it for 400 and Now I get every USER and EVERY Distro List. Now we have no need for Next/Back. Is this the behavior that you know Zibra to be able to do, or? My case is closed if so. Had I known I could have used this high amount, I would have never created any cases, etc.... We are using NE5.0.7.

Thought you knew that already, and we're just trying to figure out why next paging didn't work:

Originally Posted by jason

2) GAL does not provide Next/Back like 'Contacts' does, regardless of wethere I set GAL to 10, 25, or 100, for my domain. I have admin/ham/span/wiki hidden in GAL, and have 101 users right now, soon to be up to 400. I am real worried now, as I would like to set my GAL to something like 25 or 50, then let users use Next, etc....

Originally Posted by mmorse

I see what you're saying but permit me an explanation & this other logic mindset: It's an LDAP search, the GAL in it's current state is not intended to 'browse' it's for searching.

This is not in the 'To:' area & more for an addressbook, for example this RFE: Bug 14531 - GAL via contacts folders with sorting, browsing and real sync

You're more than welcome to file another RFE to get the next/previous buttons in the To: search to list the first x results, then use logic to remember where the first LDAP search ended and search the next x matching results. Why not just spit them all to the web-client on initial then page through them? Well LDAP searches are a performance hit (abit tiny) but this has to scale - imagine a 50,000 user GAL, you wouldn't want to be sending the web-client that many addresses every time you hit the To: button.

As you had to have manually typed in 25 or 50, it's not a drop down menu:

zmprov md domain.com zimbraGalMaxResults value

Originally Posted by jason

Thanks so much for your Help. We are Happy Again!!!

No problem, sounds like your users will love Bug 14531 - GAL via contacts folders with sorting, browsing and real sync when it's available as well.

Some others to vote for:

Bug 744 - autocomplete default towards latest choice (aka sort by recent use or popular)
Bug 22969 - Move autocomplete to server to facilitate autocomplete from Shared Addressbooks
Bug 27362 - Make other attributes visible in GAL autocomplete
Bug 26475 - Make max # of autocomplete matches to return configurable (for the user to adjust the number of results displayed in compose drop downs)

[jason]

Mike,
To help close this, I could not find any docs that referenced 100 results in the GAL, I believe I ot this from the fresh install where it defaulted to 100, so everytime we tried to use the GAL in a search, a popup happened saying that it could only return 100 results. I missinterpreted this as the max capacity. After setting the GAL search to 400, the problems went away (except the pagination if I set it to 50 or so.... but we can live with that until the new stuff arrives in future releases).
Thanks again for the support!!!

[mmorse]

Bug 21121 - when gal search returns >100 results, pagination should be enabled (see comment#2 - it's off to the server team to look at first)