Free/Busy on mac mail client?

[blaubsch]

Hi,

is there a possibility to see the Zimbra free/busy-information via a mail client (Entourage, Thunderbird, ...) on Mac Os X?

Regards,
Björn

[dpmchris]

The chosen path seems to me to be CalDAV under Leopard's iCal 3.0 which I had working last year under Zimbra RC2 hosted demo and OS X 10.5.1 in the attached picture. Unfortunately I can not seem to get this working under our deployed 5.0.1 server and 10.5.2, and need to wait on a vendor for further implementation.

As for Thunderbird/Lightning, CalDAV seems to work okay, but there are a lot of issues maintaining a calendar with this app that you can find elsewhere in the forums. I never got free/busy working but that might be solvable in some capacity, if anybody else here has done it.

Entourage may not be a target, as Exchange uses 'alternative techniques' for WebDAV storage I am gambling. See this request for more info.


Hope this helps at least a little,
Chris @ DPM

[blaubsch]

Hi Chris,

thanks for your (enlightening) answer. After 1-2 days of "looking into" Zimbra (and other competitors) i'am really disappointed. Why? There are a lot of promising solutions but i can't find an exchange competitor with a proper (integrated, offline, client) solution for Mac OS X.

Regards
Björn

[dpmchris]

Our company is mostly Mac, but the Zimbra solution was so compelling that it pushed aside the other (Google, Kerio and Exchg) contenders.

I am, myself anyway, looking forward to using Mail.app/iCal/Address Book for offline and online use, and hope that Zimbra and my Zimbra vendor can have that working soon. I also believe that the Zimbra Desktop is very usable as is, but you need to make sure it syncs enough.

That said, I mostly use the web client, and we are pushing most of our users to the web client. It is that good.



Chris @ DPM