Zimbra and CalDAV (shared calendars)

[rtanner]

Hi,

I'm just starting to evaluate Zimbra.

It does not look like Zimbra supports CalDAV (an open, calendaring specific extension to the WebDAV protocol). Is that specification already built-in or are there plans to do so?

Thanks,

Rob Tanner
Linfield College

[schemers]

We are definitely looking into it, and our server is architected in such a way that it would be easy to integerate it in as another protocol, much the way we do soap/pop/imap.

Are there any clients in particular you want to use with it?

thanks, roland

[partypooper]

KO/PI is available from http://www.pi-sync.net/html/projects.html
It is based on Korganizer from the KDE project, and works on Linux, Windows, Zaurus and some smartphones...
an asthonishing piece of software!

I hope to be able to use ko/pi with zimbra!

Thanks,

Best regards!

Keep on the good work

[Trever]

I would like to see this with Evolution as well which is in the process of adding caldav. This would seemingly also answer part of my post about tasks found elsewhere in the forums.

[jeg1972]

Originally Posted by schemers

Are there any clients in particular you want to use with it?

Roland

The obvious ones would be Mozilla Sunbird and the Mozilla Calendar extension for Thunderbird and Firefox. These are the ones that we use.

Regards

John

[paintbuoy]

This is a pretty good NewsForge article on the subject of CalDAV:
http://software.newsforge.com/softwa...6.shtml?tid=74

In the article Cosmo seems the most relevant to Zimbra as they both are Java based and run on top of Tomcat (http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/vi...ects/CosmoHome)

It would be great to see CalDAV support but it really requires the client-side implementations to mature before it becomes a pressing need. Personally I would rather see more emphasis placed on a licensed standalone Outlook Connector for the open-source edition and an iSync connector as these two pieces of functionality would satisfy the needs of a much higher proportion of Zimbra users.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by paintbuoy

...but it really requires the client-side implementations to mature...

Agree 100%. From what we've seen there aren't too many compelling clients out there to consume CalDav. Even if we had things ready to go today.

[dijichi2]

chicken and egg scenario! if there was a solid, compelling groupware solution (ie Zimbra!) on the server side that supported caldav maybe the clients would be deployed much quicker. zimbra is currently difficult to deploy across an enterprise because of the lack of interaction with other clients for major things such as contacts and calendering. caldav looks like it will be the dominant protocol, and even though its early days its support in zimbra would allow many different types of software to work with it now, even if those clients aren't very good yet. what about iCal? wouldn't caldav provision work nearly as well as isync? i see more and more offices starting to deploy firefox/thunderbird combination - as lightning/sunbird becomes more usable it would be an obvious addition.

[KevinH]

You can use both Apple iCal and Sunbird today for read-only calendar. Once the iSync adaptor is ready you'll have full native two-way sync for Mac OSX. Of course with Outlook you already have two-way sync for Windows.

[paintbuoy]

Originally Posted by dijichi2

zimbra is currently difficult to deploy across an enterprise because of the lack of interaction with other clients for major things such as contacts and calendering.

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.

It does look like things are beginning to move forward in the Mozilla camp regarding these issues but until the clients move beyond 0.1 releases you cannot blame Zimbra or any other server software for not being able to integrate with Thunderbird:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendarevice_Sync