Zimbra and CalDAV (shared calendars)

[dijichi2]

I think the Outlook Connector and planned iSync adapter provide the tools neccessary for 80-95% of desktop deployments (assuming most users run Outlook or Mail/iCal). Thunderbird does a poor job of synchronising to anything (just try syncing a PDA with Thunderbird/Sunbird) which makes it very difficult to blame Zimbra for not being able to deploy within the network.

i'm not sure that's a valid assumption - osx is a minute fraction of desktops, great os though it is, and lots of companies dont use outlook as policy. although of course i understand why zimbra would go for the far more mature outook/isync option first of all, caldav looks exciting as a unifying standard. it would be nice if zimbra supported open standards so that we can use the other 2/3rds of zimbra other than imap with open standard clients. thunderbird has very good imap and ldap support for synchronizing with servers and is a nice corporate client, although has its flaws.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

it would be nice if zimbra supported open standards so that we can use the other 2/3rds of zimbra other than imap with open standard clients.

We support iCal which is the major open standard for calendar data in today's clients. CalDAV is nice and if/when it becomes standard we'll be sure to support it. Today the client support is lacking and the protocol itself is far from being complete or standardized. Of course the code is out there so if the community interest strong enough I'm sure we'll see a project to get a CalDAV sync working with Zimbra.

For contacts we support them in several formats: CVS, vCard (an upcoming release). I'm sure there are other formats out there for sync'ing contacts, and we'll add what's needed as we see the interest.

Take a look at our REST api's they are very complete. If you've got ideas for other protocols or formats please post an RFE to bugzilla. That's the best way to get them into our queue.

[stevekstevek]

Originally Posted by KevinH

We support iCal which is the major open standard for calendar data in today's clients. CalDAV is nice and if/when it becomes standard we'll be sure to support it. Today the client support is lacking and the protocol itself is far from being complete or standardized. Of course the code is out there so if the community interest strong enough I'm sure we'll see a project to get a CalDAV sync working with Zimbra.

Apple's iCal has pretty good caldav support, in both directions. I use it all with a version of Cosmo right now, and is great. I use Moz calendar on linux with it as well.

Actually, this is a pretty disappointing thing to be missing from Zimbra: Not sure why you'd do iSync for the Mac before caldav which would work for a variety of clients.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by stevekstevek

Apple's iCal has pretty good caldav support, in both directions. I use it all with a version of Cosmo right now, and is great. I use Moz calendar on linux with it as well.

Actually, this is a pretty disappointing thing to be missing from Zimbra: Not sure why you'd do iSync for the Mac before caldav which would work for a variety of clients.

Thanks for the note Steve. I'd encourage you to try our iSync beta and see where you still think CalDav is superior. Like I've said a few times from the clients we've looked at and the support in the industry CalDav is still in the early stages. Mac's support for iSync is a bit richer at the moment. We understand the benefits of CalDav long term and when a larger number of clients get deployed we'll be working on Zimbra CalDav support. As always thanks for the feedback!

[paintbuoy]

Its interesting to hear Apple supports CalDav, its not mentioned on their website (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/) or in the help files.

Kevin is the iSync beta available for the open source edition?
I would love to try the Beta out but I can't find a reference to it on the website.
Could you post a link?

[KevinH]

http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/...ple_isync.html

[stevekstevek]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Thanks for the note Steve. I'd encourage you to try our iSync beta and see where you still think CalDav is superior. Like I've said a few times from the clients we've looked at and the support in the industry CalDav is still in the early stages. Mac's support for iSync is a bit richer at the moment. We understand the benefits of CalDav long term and when a larger number of clients get deployed we'll be working on Zimbra CalDav support. As always thanks for the feedback!

I think that the main reason that caldav is better, is because the synchronization is done in _real time_. That is, as soon as I drag out a new appointment in iCal, it gets sent right up through CalDav to be shared. (I've been playing with the cosmo caldav server from OSAF).

With iSync, I need to manually run iSync all the time..

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by stevekstevek

I think that the main reason that caldav is better, is because the synchronization is done in _real time_. That is, as soon as I drag out a new appointment in iCal, it gets sent right up through CalDav to be shared. (I've been playing with the cosmo caldav server from OSAF).

With iSync, I need to manually run iSync all the time..

Fair point. How big is your user group? Are they all using clients that support CalDav? Most groups/companies don't fall into this category. Cosmo is in pretty early beta/alpha. Not sure what their roadmap is but my guess is it will be quite sometime before it's a released product that is ready for live deployments.

[stevekstevek]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Fair point. How big is your user group? Are they all using clients that support CalDav? Most groups/companies don't fall into this category. Cosmo is in pretty early beta/alpha. Not sure what their roadmap is but my guess is it will be quite sometime before it's a released product that is ready for live deployments.

We're a SMB with 50-100 users. Right now, about 25% of these are using Macs, for which rich iCal integration would be ideal, and although we can do the iSync thing, I think it's less than ideal.

CalDAV is the emerging standard here: Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar/Lightning, Evolution are all using this now, but there's more support coming soon:

http://software.newsforge.com/articl...2140226&tid=74

[dual_prophet]

HTTP "PUT" capability via the REST ?fmt=ics URL (perhaps with mod_dav for tomcat?) would put us in business. If the free/busy ?fmt=ifb URL had dav, wouldn't outlook Free/Busy information publishing also be nativley capable?

The zimbra blog has an entry demonstrating usage of curl to update the calendar via ics http upload, so we are close.