Zimbra in a SOA

[ghopson]

Hi,

First post, so please be gentle :-)

I am looking at wrappering Zimbra as a Message Service in a SOA, using all the SOAP goodness to provide a business service to an ESB. On the other side of the ESB is my Presentation Service, a web app in which I am hoping to use parts of the Zimbra Web Client (folders, message views, zimlets etc.). Users log in, see their message inbox, read, file, respond etc. All passes back down to my Message Service via the ESB using SOAP calls etc.

Questions:
- is this feasible?
- has anyone done this before and can they share pitfalls etc?
- how does message delivery work in this set up (assuming that a message is pushed to the Presentation Service by the ZCS)
- do I need to open up ports for IMAP etc on the ESB/firewall

Sorry its vague- if you want more details, I can try to explain further in this thread.

Thanks for your time
Geoff

[ljm]

Quick thoughts:
1. using Zimbra's SOAP service/s takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of it it's reasonably straightforward.
2. Picking out and repurposing bits of the web client will be hard.. There might be licensing issues there too - I'm not sure.
3. Transport between your client and the Zimbra server can be SOAP. Depending on what you want to do you might need some out of band (non-SOAP) http/s traffic too.
4. You shouldn't need to open up IMAP on the firewall because you can get at email messages via SOAP.

To avoid getting overwhelmed my suggestion would be to start with something really simple to get a feel it.