Address Book Sync

[Mike Oliveri]

I'll be doing an Exchange '03 to Zimbra migration very soon, and I've got a last-minute question from a couple of users. What they like about the Outlook Web Access is they have their address book/contacts available in both OWA and in Outlook on their desktop.

Is there any way to duplicate this functionality in Zimbra? For example, sync either a Tbird or Outlook address book with the Zimbra Web Client, or use Zimbra to sync address books between home and work desktops?

Will the coming Zimbra Desktop sync addresses between it and the Zimbra Web Client?

Thanks,
Mike

[dkarp]

If you're using the Network edition, the ZCO Outlook connector will keep your address books in sync between Outlook and the web client.

If you're using the OSS edition and connecting to ZCS via IMAP, you'll run into the issue that Outlook/IMAP doesn't do contacts. You might be able to export your ZCS contacts to a .csv or .vcf file and periodically import them into Outlook, but there's no simple 2-way sync that Outlook allows.

[Brian Michalk]

So exactly which protocols are supported in OSS Zimbra for syncing of contacts?
Is it possible to interface directly with the Zimbra LDAP server? Is that where contacts are stored?

[dkarp]

Contacts are not stored in LDAP (this would kill your LDAP master write throughput in any large install). You can get your contacts in .vcf (vCard 3.0) or .csv format via the REST interface.