ZCS Address book, Google Apps, Smart phones, Contacts

[parachutetechs]

I don't know if I'm in the right forum for this question, but I thought it might be a good place to start.

Is it possible to use the address book feature of Zimbra (I have a ZCS 7 instance that I've been trying out for a couple of weeks, now) as a place for storing contact information that will eventually be synchronized to Google Apps? My organization is stuck on GApps, but the system has a number of limitations. There's no way that we've been able to find to maintain a central directory of employee email, address, etc. information, such that each person's gmail (including email type-ahead) and smart phone contacts are kept up-to-date.

Rather than building an entirely custom solution, we'd like to use the Zimbra address book as the place to store contact information and employ custom SQL tools for synchronizing the information to gmail contacts for everyone in the organization. Ideally, an HR person would be able to create and maintain records for new and existing employees and disable records for people who have left the company.

From the Zimbra store, we would want to update everyone's iphones and Androids, pretty frequently. If, in other words, a new person joins the company, we'd like to get information out to everyone with their contact information. When a person leaves, we'd want to have HR able to still view their information, but not have that info. show up in type-ahead, email searches, etc.

If there's anything out there for doing this kind of thing, please let me know. I'm hoping to at least find out to what extent it's possible: how is Zimbra address book data stored and how does one go about synchronizing the info. do a separate store?

Thanks,

-Anthony