Contact groups, keeping everything up-to-date and syncro

[moiseev.igor]

Hello, we've been migrated to Zimbra mostly because of the ease of sharing Calendar and Address Book and now we're encountering the difficulty to manage the contacts in the persistent way, maybe because of our newbie experience of Zimbra.

What do I mean. Since we have thousands of contacts, we are trying to manage them by creating a lot of groups and subgroups, the typical structure is "University"=>"Faculty"=>"Group". So as I see there should be created the global "University group" which contains all university members, then for each faculty we make one single group and then partition it into final student groups to be able to send the batch email messages to different faculties and/or students groups.

So how could it be accomplished using Zimbra?

We've tried the standard "Contact group", but unfortunately realised that the modification of the email of the contact doesn't propagate to the corresponding record in the group and subgroup. So it become an awful problem to maintain the correct and up-to-date structure of contacts!

Any help/advise is very-very welcome!
Thank you!

The version of Zimbra we're currently using: Release 7.1.0_GA_3140.UBUNTU10_64 UBUNTU10_64 FOSS edition.

[moiseev.igor]

Hello, any answer! Thanks.

During these days I've explored the following:

1. that on the default installation Zimbra manages everything by means of MySQL DB;
2. to enable root access use follwing command under the zimbra user
   

   zmmypasswd [ --root ] newpassword

3. next that we have mostly one system database name zimbra and various schemas for every mailbox, that is mboxgroup1, mboxgroup2, ...
4. all data regarding emails, contacts and groups of contacts are saved in

   mboxgroup1.mail_item

5. contacts and groups are distinct from other types of records by the field mboxgroup1.type
   

   mboxgroup1.type='6'

6. groups are distinct from contacts by the special structure of mboxgroup1.metadata field, that is
   1. the group metadata field init by

      d3:fldd5:dlist

   2. the contact metadata field init

      d3:fldd

The last gives the possibility to distinguish between groups and contacts.

Is it somehow correct?

Is it a stable structure or it may vary on some matter, so that the scheme could fail?

Thanks for any consideration!