Zimbra stores no contact information in LDAP dir?

[davidvw]

Hi,
the organisation i work for has need of a centralized contact management. Some extra functionallity would be nice. So i decided to take a look at some groupware solutions. I really liked zimbra a lot because of the tagging and the intuitive ajax interface. But yesterday i read somewhere that zimbra doesnt store its contact info on the LDAP server but on the mysql server. In that case, the members of my organization won't be able to see their contacts in another client like outlook or evolution via LDAP.
1. Is this correct information?
2. Is there a workaround for this? If not, i dont think i will choose zimbra but probably will go for scalix or phpgroupware.
Thanks for your anwser and sorry for any bad english...

[jholder]

1. Is this correct information?
2. Is there a workaround for this? If not, i dont think i will choose zimbra but probably will go for scalix or phpgroupware.
Thanks for your anwser and sorry for any bad english...

1) No it's not. We are totally standards compliant, and many of our users use LDAP for auth/directories.

2) Not applicable

Let me know if you have further questions!
john

[davidvw]

thanks for your reply.
Is the information on this topic outdated? Personal Contacts from LDAP
So your saying that users are able to see and edit their contacts in evolution via an external LDAP directory? How can i setup Zimbra in that way? I cant find anything to do this in the admin UI.

[bhavionline]

1) No it's not. We are totally standards compliant, and many of our users use LDAP for auth/directories.

2) Not applicable

Let me know if you have further questions!
john

Hello,

Could u please give me a direction where to start if i wish to extract contacts information lets say phone number, mobile number and pass it on to an external application.

[JoshuaPrismon]

Hello,

Could u please give me a direction where to start if i wish to extract contacts information lets say phone number, mobile number and pass it on to an external application.

Zimbra implements the standard organizationalPerson LDAP objectClass. That information is browseable even on a anonymous bound.

That gives you access to the following fields:
organizationalPerson
[->person] - title $ x121Address $ registeredAddress $ destinationIndicator $ preferredDeliveryMethod $ telexNumber $ teletexTerminalIdentifier $ telephoneNumber $ internationaliSDNNumber $ facsimileTelephoneNumber $ street $ postOfficeBox $ postalCode $ postalAddress $ physicalDeliveryOfficeName $ ou $ st $ l

As well as the following fields which are from Person:
person sn $ cn userPassword $ telephoneNumber $ seeAlso $ description core.

Now, if you wanted to modify these fields you would have to bind either as the user who you are editing, or as the administrator.

[bhavionline]

Thanks for the information.

I was able to connect to the LDAP and query the telephone numbers of the zimbra users. However i wish to query telephone numbers in individual users address book, basically i want to get a list of zimbra users who have a contact in their address book whose telephone number matches with the number i am querying.

When i browse the directory with base dn set to
ou=people, dc=mydomain, dc=com what i get is the list of users and not individual users contacts.

Does zimbra store these in LDAP if yes then what is the base dn that i need to search, if no then what is the way to reach this information

Regards
Bhavi

[addihetja]

I would REALLY like to be able to do this too.

Mail.app on Mac OS X contains a feature for the client to autocompelete from an LDAP server. Pointing Mail.app to the Zimbra server only returns local users, not records from the user's Address book.

The only answers I have gotten from Zimbra and from these forums is that this is "a limitation of the email client, not Zimbra", that Zimbra is working as advertised and that I could set up an "External LDAP" server to do this.


I'm looking for functionality, not reasons why this is or is not working.
If I set up my own LDAP I still need to populate the server with records. I don't want to do this manually so I need Zimbra to do this for me.

A.

PS: This really is "the only" missing feature in Zimbra, AFIAC
PPS: Browsing "Contacts" via LDAP "works", but not the another user's shared Contacts mounted in a users account.

[dijichi2]

Address books are held in SQL, only GAL is held in LDAP, so this is a limitation of Zimbra, not of the email client. When I asked this before, the reason given was that if the address books are held in sql, all the usual funky zimbra search/tag stuff can be done with them which seemed like a good answer. Unfortunately this means every mail client needs to have a plugin written in order to access the addressbooks.

[addihetja]

Then we need a plugin....

Where can I request one?

[dijichi2]

bugzilla.zimbra.com