Zimbra calendar in large(r) organisations

[ThomS]

Hi fellow Zimbra users and administrators,

We are currently in the process of implementing Zimbra for one of our customers. However, we ran into several issues regarding the functionality of the Zimbra calendar and what is demanded by the organization’s power users: the secretariat.

This makes me wonder how Zimbra is used in other large organizations. I am sure these organizations would run into the same problems as my customer.

Some general issues I encountered:

• Zimbra seems to lack calendar provisioning options in the admin console. Most important is that there seems to be no centralized control of calendars.
  For example the possibility for an administrator to set default sharing options for new users.
  Or for an administrator to be able to create a hierarchical structure of calendars consisting of all users in the organization. Which can be shown in each users account.

Some of the issues our customer encountered:

• When a lot of calendars are added (in our case: +/- 80) you lose overview;
  
• There is no possibility to quickly find and open/select a specific calendar (I would love to have a pop-up window to search and open a calendar > Zimlet?);
  
• Nested calendars can only be created at CLI level, not by users;
  
• When adding groups of attendees my customer wants to be able to view free/busy information of that group. If you use distribution lists (created from the admin console) free/busy information is not displayed when the group is added to the appointment.
  However, if you create a ‘contact group’ locally in the webmail client and add that contact group as participant to an appointment the group is split up into the individual contacts and free/busy information of all the group member’s is available. Problematic in this case is that ‘contact group’ are created by individual users, and are not centrally managed. If distribution lists behaved the same as ‘contact groups’ this issue would be solved.
  
• Numerical overview of how many attendees have accepted the appointment, declined the appointment, and have not yet responded to the invitation.
  
• Possibility to have more windows open at the same time. And which can be controlled separately from each other. E.g. having one window with all the resource calendars available and another window with frequently used calendars already open.
  (With the current Zimbra version (6.0.8) when you open a calendar in a new window you get a non-editable view of only a single calendar. It would be useful if it would be possible to view all selected calendars in a new window)

I would appreciate to get some experiences from others who have implemented Zimbra in larger organizations and if someone has a solution or good work-around for the issues mentioned I would like to hear them too of course.

Thanks.

[ewilen]

Have you tried searching bugzilla.zimbra.com to see if any of your items have already been entered as RFE's? If not, you might create them yourself, or (if you have NE) open a support ticket.

Originally Posted by ThomS

[*]Nested calendars can only be created at CLI level, not by users;

Users can create nested calendars using Outlook and ZCO. I'm not sure I understand the logic of nested calendars; typically I find they get created by mistake, and then they cause problems elsewhere (at least in troubleshooting).