Synchronizing contacts without Zimbra account

[leekyuh]

Hi, as I became a big fan of Zimbra Desktop, I installed 4 copies - 2 on linux environment and 2 on windows environment. These are actually a desktop and a laptop both having linux/windows partitions.

The problem here, is that I desperately need a way to synchronize personal contacts to take advantage of auto-completion.

The company's e-mail server is MS Exchange 2010 and I'm accessing via IMAP protocol, so obviously contacts cannot be sync'ed in normal way. So I came up with 2 ideas but failed to find any relevant information.
1. Sync contacts with Gmail.
2. Sync the Zimbra contacts file using Dropbox.

If anybody could tell me or direct me to a page on how to achieve this goal, please let me know. I was exporting/importing address books but I finally got really exhausted.

Thanks a lot!

[storm]

I can't see a simple way *at the moment*. I had the same issue with contacts from one workplace last year.

There is a solution on the horizon though:

If Zimbra let you add remote addressbooks, you may be able to use DavMail (a conversion server which can run remotely or locally even on your laptop/pc), which would collect your contacts from Exchange and turn them into CardDav format and re-serve them. Zimbra would then sync them (both ways if desired) via a remote addressbook.

For that to work, Zimbra needs to allow remote addressbooks. Vote or comment here to get that on the roadmap: Bug 67043 – Ability to sync with remote addressbooks including CardDav and LDAP

(NB DavMail can also reserve your calenders in CalDav format - which Zimbra/Desktop will shortly be able to access, once Bug Bug 39402 – Ability to access and mount external calendars via CalDAV in ZWC reaches Zimbra Desktop - probably next release.)

[leekyuh]

Thanks strom, do you think it's possible to sync "address book" file as a temporary workaround for now?

After voting to the link you mentioned, I just found myself that I already voted to a similar one(or request):
Bug 24467 – Ability to synchronize with Exchange account via EWS (or equivalent)
It's been more than 3 years already since first requested, but it seems that many people are pretty interested.
I hope Zimbra developers could allocate more resources on this address book issue.

[storm]

The EWS bug you linked would be useful, thanks. Some work appears to have been done on it last year, and then nothing

It would be a lot more useful than having to use DavMail as a third party resource to 'translate'.

I'm sorry, I don't know of other ways...

Do you have Outlook access from your office machine? If so you could try: mOffice outlook sync, android outlook sync

Which syncs directly fro Outlook to Android.

[leekyuh]

Thanks, I think I'll just wait for now.
I use more often in linux environment anyway.