two-way icalendar sync with open source edition?

[probablydrew]

We are looking at testing Zimbra at a small business and I had a question about calendar sync.

The Lightning/Sunbird icalendar support is beginning to mature, for example you can now use the Thunderbird 2.0 release candidate with the Lightning addon and it will do two-way syncing with Google Calendar via icalendar.
http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239

What I wanted to know was, can I now or in the near future do two-way sync between Zimbra and Lightning/Sunbird, and if so can the "open source" version of Zimbra do this?

I'm sorry if this sounds like an old question to some, but I looked through the forums and wiki and wasn't able to find a clear answer, I ran into lots of messages with people using the term "ical" as in the Mac app, and "icalendar" as in the standard, interchangeably. And also a lot of old posts regarding one-way sunbird sync from a long time ago.

I've also run across the cladav bugzilla entry
http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6052
but I don't know if this encompasses all ical features, or if it will be available in the "open source" edition.

Any info would be appreciated.

[soxfan]

I played around with this a little bit using Thunderbird and Lightning. I was certainly able to view the Zimbra calendar in Thunderbird, but could never get it working so that I could make changes in T-bird and have them update the Zimbra server. Didn't put enough time into it to say whether I was doing something wrong, or if it just isn't possible.

[glitch23]

Ok so far so good, just about everything seems to work correctly, both ways. There is either something wrong/unsupported by lightning or my tbird/lightning/linux setup is messed up.

If I make appointments in Tbird they show up in Zimbra.
If I make appointments in ZWC they show up in Tbird.
If I recieve an invite for an appointment and click "Add to Calendar" in Tbird it gets added to the Tbird calendar and updated in ZWC and the ZWC won't show you the "Accept" and "Decline" buttons when you view the message.

Now I just have to figure out how or why Tbird won't send out invitations when I create a new event and add Attendees. I'm pretty sure it should just send out emails with .ics attachments to all attendees meaning Zimbra and Tbird should be able to process the message accordingly.

[colin7151]

Ok so far so good, just about everything seems to work correctly, both ways. There is either something wrong/unsupported by lightning or my tbird/lightning/linux setup is messed up.

If I make appointments in Tbird they show up in Zimbra.
If I make appointments in ZWC they show up in Tbird.
If I recieve an invite for an appointment and click "Add to Calendar" in Tbird it gets added to the Tbird calendar and updated in ZWC and the ZWC won't show you the "Accept" and "Decline" buttons when you view the message.

Now I just have to figure out how or why Tbird won't send out invitations when I create a new event and add Attendees. I'm pretty sure it should just send out emails with .ics attachments to all attendees meaning Zimbra and Tbird should be able to process the message accordingly.

Can you post more details on how exactly you did this ? I can never get lightning or outlook to write back to the server.

[glitch23]

To get this to all work together, so far at least, I followed the steps in the link posted above for getting Thunderbird/Lightning to sync with GCal...

Part of the Provider for Google extension is the option to make the remote/network calendar that you create in iCalendar format and you give it the URL to your zimbra Calendar. It will ask you for a user/pw when it tries to connect.

I've also figured out my last problem which was Tbird not sending out invites, and that was because Lightning 0.3.1 does not support that feature. However Lightning 0.5 does support this by sending out email with the .ics file attached. My only roadblock right now is that the Zimbra Web Client views these emails with the .ics file as an attachment, and I can only download it or open it in another app, but not add it to my zimbra calendar...

Supposedly this worked in testing (search google for lightning 0.5 and Zimbra) but I haven't gotten it to work.

Funny thing is if I use Thunderbird to create the event From user A and add user B, If user B uses Thunderbird he gets the invite correctly and can add it to his Lightning calendar which then updates his Zimbra calendar. Go figure...

[probablydrew]

Ok so far so good, just about everything seems to work correctly, both ways. There is either something wrong/unsupported by lightning or my tbird/lightning/linux setup is messed up.

If I make appointments in Tbird they show up in Zimbra.
If I make appointments in ZWC they show up in Tbird.
If I recieve an invite for an appointment and click "Add to Calendar" in Tbird it gets added to the Tbird calendar and updated in ZWC and the ZWC won't show you the "Accept" and "Decline" buttons when you view the message.

Now I just have to figure out how or why Tbird won't send out invitations when I create a new event and add Attendees. I'm pretty sure it should just send out emails with .ics attachments to all attendees meaning Zimbra and Tbird should be able to process the message accordingly.

Were you able to do this using the "open source edition" without any extra connectors?

[glitch23]

Yes this is all done using the Open Source Edition. The connector in this case is the Google Provider Extension for Thunderbird, it handles the calendar changes for the remote (read: zimbra) calendar.

Heres the quick blurb about Zimbra working with the Event invitations sent out by Lightning.

http://blog.mozilla.com/lilmatt/2007...a-invitations/

As you can see the accept and decline buttons show up correctly, and as he states they get properly added to the calendar.

[Lath]

To get this to all work together, so far at least, I followed the steps in the link posted above for getting Thunderbird/Lightning to sync with GCal...

I attempted to follow the steps from the link above.
When adding the calendar, do you add it as a iCalendar format or as a Google Calendar format? I tried both.

When I attempted to add it as a Google Calendar, it says "Your calendar has been created", but it doesn't actually appear in my calendar list, nor does it make a request to get the calendar data. In the Error Console, I see this error:

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [calICalendar.uri]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/****/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/****/extensions/****/js/calCalendarManager.js :: anonymous :: line 295" data: no]
Source File: file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/****/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/****/extensions/****/js/calCalendarManager.js
Line: 295

When I attempted to add it as a iCalendar format, it appears correctly in Lightning. However, when I try to add a new event, I get this error from Thunderbird:

There has been an error reading data for calendar: calendar. It has been placed in read-only mode, since changes to this calendar will likely result in data-loss. You may change this setting by choosing 'Edit Calendar'. Description: Publishing the calendar file failed
Status code: 404: no such item

I can see it make an HTTP request as follows:

PUT /service/user/****/calendar.ics HTTP/1.1
Host: ****
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070326 Thunderbird/2.0.0.0 Mnenhy/0.7.5.0
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Content-Length: 46801
Content-Type: text/calendar
Authorization: Basic ****

After which follows the entire calendar data including the new entry. However, the web server replies:

HTTP/1.1 404 no such item
Date: Mon, 07 May 2007 18:18:20 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 988
Set-Cookie: ZM_AUTH_TOKEN=****
Connection: close

...along with an apache error message.

It then makes a PROPFIND request which also fails. I can provide the details if it is helpful, but I'll omit them for brevity's sake.

Can anyone help me with this?

[glitch23]

1) It should be iCalendar Format

2) What are you using for the calendar address?

It should be:

http://yourservername/zimbra/home/us...lendar?fmt=ics

[Lath]

Ah, I guess I picked up the wrong URL somewhere. I had /service/user/<username>/calendar.ics instead of the one you listed. Thanks for the correction!

Now I am able to create new events and have them show up in the zimbra web client. Also, when someone sends me an invitation, and I accept, it is added to my calendar on the web client, though I have to reload the calendar to have it appear in thunderbird.

It is however, still making the PROPFIND http requests which fail after each operation.

Changing items by dragging them around or deleting them does not seem to be reflected in zimbra, and when reloading the changes disappear.

Sending invitations doesn't appear to work either, but I'm on Lightning 0.3.1, so I wasn't expecting them to, per your comment above.

Thanks!