A bit disappointed!

[xperseguers]

Hello,

I'm using the OS edition of Zimbra for about 2 years and have always been quite happy. I've always used Thunderbird to access my mails and was happy to find Zindus (Zindus) to help me synchronize my address books. I switched to a MacBook Pro a few months ago and could go on using my setup (Thunderbird/Zindus/Zimbra) without problem. I tried to use Lightning to have calendars too but it quickly became unusable as I could only read my calendar entries. Thus I bought a old-fashion calendar on paper to be able to have always it by hand.

So far so good.

Now, a few weeks ago I bought an iPhone and was as such forced to use the Address Book of Mac OS X. I managed to import all my entries and was pleased with that, although my contacts were not synchronized anymore with Thunderbird nor Zimbra.

OK. Yesterday I thought I should give a try to the network edition of Zimbra and installed it (I'll have to deal with Outlook too for a colleague). But how am I disappointed as the iSync does not handle multiple address books, what a pity! Zindus does it for free! And what about calendars? It seems I cannot really synchronize them to local calendars and as such it seems I cannot synchronize them to my iPhone.

My setup becomes complex too if I want to have all my stuff together:

iPhone <-> Mac OSX with iTunes
Mac OSX <-> Zimbra with iSync
Zimbra <-> Thunderbird with Zindus

Not to talk about duplicated entries, stuff that do not show up...

I'll have to test the Outlook connector too to see whether it works better because I'm not convinced to pay a yearly fee just to have connectors in addition to the OS edition (I do not need other stuffs) and have something I'm not 100% happy with :-(

[xperseguers]

Now, when I plug in my iPhone, iTunes shows up and I get a dialog box asking whether I want to "delete data" (this is an iSync dialog). Of course not! I only want to synchronize and merge them, not delete them. I give it a try and say "yes" just to see what happens. Perhaps is it "normal" to answer yes but the message just fears me. Why should I delete data? When I reset synchronization logs, it's fine, I know the direction of my import and it's OK to "loose" data but not for everyday's use.

Outlook Connector: I tested it last hour and it simply thrown away all address book entries from Outlook to replace the profile with a "Zimbra Profile". My colleague did not have any message nor calendar entries thus I can only say that all address book entries disappeared. The problem is he only had a "old" backup of data and as I left him, I did not had tried to plug his iPhone to his laptop because he feared loosing the copy of his entries he had on his iPhone.

Seems that there's still plenty of room for enhancement in usability ;-)

[xperseguers]

OK. Let's say a last word on this topic for now. Even if I should say that on the sister category, I would like to post feedback about the Outlook Connector I used for my colleague. After having synchronized again the iPhone, all contacts were put back in Outlook.

Furthermore, calendars and multiple address books were sychronized very well and very quick with Zimbra. I must admit that the Outlook Connector is outstanding compared to the iSync connector. Seems that more effort was put on Windows plateform than on Apple one.

I think I'll go on and use the network edition for accounts that need synchronization and just hope that the Zimbra developers will put more effort on a solution that really works, that is able to synchronize multiple address books, calendars natively in order to let them being synchronized with external devices and enhance the usability of the connector as it is not clear why it asks whether I want to delete my contacts (should at least describe where it wants to delete them from).