Using Zimbra (Open Source Edition) for calendaring only?

[david55]

[I swithered over whether this should go in "Migration", but my query is about setting up, from our perspective, a new service, rather than migrating any of our existing services.]

Is it possible to use only the calendaring part of Zimbra? We're essentially looking for something that would in effect provide a self-hosted approximate equivalent to Google Calendar: allowing our users to add events to shared calendars, some public, some private (to members of the group(s)), access these via iCalendar, and publish the public calendars to the web.

User email is hosted elsewhere and we cannot, and have no wish, to change this. If possible, we don't even want to set up additional (Zimbra) email addresses for users, run an MTA or set an MX record for the server on which Zimbra would be installed. We don't want users to access email via Zimbra at all (ideally, we'd like to disable the email part of Zimbra entirely so that users don't even know it exists), unless it is unavoidable to have Zimbra email addresses for users for its own internal management and operation of the calendaring system. If Zimbra needs to send email to users, we would prefer that it uses our existing mailserver directly, and that it sends email to users' existing email addresses if it needs to contact users by email.

Is it possible to set up Zimbra Open Source Edition in this way?

Thanks for any advice.

[Dirk]

I dont think Zimbra is able to meet your needs on this. It's an intergrated suite of collaborative tools, the email side being the most central, you can't cut that part out. It's not going to be possible for you to run Zimbra in 'Calendar Only' mode.

[david55]

Thanks, Dirk. If it's necessary for Zimbra to work that way, we could probably live with the additional "local" email addresses.

Do you know if it would then be possible/easy to set up Zimbra so that users couldn't use their Zimbra email addresses to send email to "the outside world" (ie, they would not be able to send to email addresses not local to the Zimbra server, and ideally they would only be able to respond to calendar-related emails, and not send email "spontaneously").

We would also need to be able to configure the system so that calendar notifications received at their Zimbra email addresses would be automatically forwarded/copied to their "real" email addresses, as users wouldn't be monitoring the Zimbra mail regularly in ordinary use.

As a small part of a larger organisation, we don't have the scope to change our existing main email setup.

[y@w]

As far as I know you can't not install the mail feature of Zimbra, but you can hide it from users. You just disable all features in the admin console for the class of service that you want the users on.

I would suggest checking out the Split Domain page over at the Zimbra wiki. You should be able to setup the users to deliver mail to a different mail system for invitations, etc. (Accepting invitations will be interesting).

[david55]

Thanks. Unfortunately, this "Split Domain" setup sounds like it might be more complicated than we want to have to deal with.

Regarding "accepting invitations", I should perhaps clarify what it is we're looking for. We want to have a number of calendars (some accessible for viewing by the public) for various series of events and meetings (with one or more users adding the event details to the series that they are responsible for). Nobody will be explicitly invited to these events, which occur reasonably regularly; the relevant staff know that they will need to check their calendar(s) to look out for the relevant meetings and then attend if possible, and so there is no need for invitations to be sent nor acknowledged.