Zimbra and a central Address book?

[JanJoost]

Hi all,

We've started evaluating Zimbra here (looking for an Exchange replacement), and so far almost everything looks good!

There are some small things that would make life easier (such as automatically share your calendar read-only with all colleagues instead of one-by-one - although I've found a thread where this seems to be possible from the CLI), but all in all I am _very_ impressed!

One thing which I can't find right now, neither in the forums nor in the documentation is dealing with the GAL and addressbook functionality.

In short: What I'd _love_ to do is to have one address book per user for personal contacts, and one central addressbook for all company contacts.

And ideally I'd like to sync both with the iPhones we have here.

So far I've found that in theory I could create a new user (basically a dummy account), create an address book for that user, and share that with all people in the company here.

But are there ways to go about without having to use a dummy user for this?

Thanks in advance!

[Klug]

Welcome to the forum.

Originally Posted by JanJoost

So far I've found that in theory I could create a new user (basically a dummy account), create an address book for that user, and share that with all people in the company here.

That's the way we work, our customers works and anyone I know using ZCS in a company (with a central address book) works...

But I'm opened to any other suggestion 8)

Even a browsable external GAL won't be as easy as this, because you'll still need to be able to add contacts.

[mmorse]

Another welcome to the forums,

For privacy we share only free-busy info by default. ZWC: New Event > Schedule > type names OR visit a REST URL like http:// zimbraserver.domain.com/home/username?fmt=freebusy to display an aggregate HTML calendar of the user’s free-busy data. (Of course you can always choose to select “exclude this calendar when reporting free/busy times” on your calendar properties if you wish.)

So you have permissions & mountpoints. You can blanket permission to all users in a domain but not actually mount the calendars in their accounts, then they could right-click > 'link to shared calendar' if they should want to add someone's.

Examples:
zmmailbox -z -m theshare@domain.com modifyFolderGrant /Folder account user@domain.com rwix

r = viewer rights
rwixd = manager rights

You could do any of the following [account <name> |group <name> |domain <name> |all |public| guest <email> <password>] followed by the permissions like r, rw, rwix, rwixd, rwixda, none, etc.

(r)ead - search, view overviews and items
(w)rite - edit drafts/contacts/notes, set flags
(i)nsert - copy/add to directory, create subfolders
action (x) - workflow actions, like accepting appointments
(d)elete - delete items and subfolders, set \Deleted flag
(a)dminister - delegate admin and change permissions

The createMountpoint command is commonly used after this:
zmmailbox z -m user@domain.com createMountpoint --view appointment "/Vacation Calendar" vacationcal@domain.com /VacationDates

A share@domain.com or sharemonkey@domain.com for a common addressbook is what a lot of people do.

What Klug is talking about - vote for Bug 29697 - External (non-Zimbra) addresses in GAL though it might get duped like the below:
Bug 18603 - GAL should have the ability to contain entries that are not Zimbra user (private) & Bug 21879 - Add non-Zimbra email addresses to GAL > Bug 14531 - GAL via contacts folders with sorting, browsing and real sync

[JanJoost]

Hi Mike and Klug,

Thank you both for your elaborate answer, very helpful indeed!

I'll go and fidget with a sharemonkey account then

Thanks again for both the answer and the excellent product, which I really start to enjoy!

Cheers,

JanJoost