Integrating with external data sources

[oestergaard]

Hi guys,

I see that there's no shared contacts yet (right?). Well, what I want to do is the following:

I have an external database (postgresql and that ain't gonna change) with some user information (e-mail addresses, names, various info) - I want to integrate this information with Zimbra, so that I can mouse-over an e-mail address (the From: field for starters) and immediately see some of this information (like if I had added the user to my contacts).

I have a group of people who will need to see this information, so copying the outside data source into my own contacts would be a little silly. Also, I would want to have the information update as the outside data source changes.

Now, I figure there are several ways to cut this cake... I could run a cron job to periodically migrate information from the outside data source into Zimbra (but where would the information go - how would it get into Zimbra?).

Or, somehow Zimbra could be told to use a web application to query the outside data source for information about a given e-mail address (or name or ...)

Are both possible? How would I go about the latter? Is there documentation I could read on this?

Any ideas or suggestions on how to go about this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks guys

[joshuamorgan]

for the latter, check the documentation available with the source code (ZimbraServer/docs).

im not sure whether this will help you as such but hopefully it can point you into the right direction.

[KevinH]

If you have an LDAP interface to the data you can configure it as an external GAL (Global Address List). This way the data will be available for users. Other wise like Josh said you'd have to use the SOAP api to put this data into each user's contact list. An even easier way would be to dump your addresses to a cvs file then load import them into Zimbra.