Auto-link to shared address books?

[ragaskar]

I'm having difficulty finding out whether this functionality does or should exist. We're using 01.com's zimbra hosting, and whenever I share an address book folder with a distro list or a user, in order to have that address book in the user's address book list, i have to manually use the "Link to Shared Address Book Folder".

Even for five users, this is a lot of work -- say that I want each user to have a shared contact list that they 'own', for each user i have to

1. Create a Shared Address Book.
2. Log on to every other account and add a link to the user's shared account.

For five users, that's 25 separate folders that need to be set up! Given, this could be reduced by having a single user play 'host' to a single shared address book, and then giving out write permissions to each user, but even then, we're talking about me setting up that folder for five people rather than one user setting it up and sharing it with a distro list. Also I think this is a little organizationally flawed, as it doesn't suggest the 'true owner' of the address list like the other method does.

The way I expected this to work is that folders which I have shared automatically show up in the address book index of users with whom they've been shared. Is this what *should* be happening and we are experiencing a bug with our server? I believe zimbra is using the 5.0 version of Zimbra. I've looked through the documentation and searched google and couldn't find an answer to this (in fact, I couldn't find any docs on the "Link to Shared Address Book" functionality - i just happened to stumble on it while clicking around trying to get into the shared folder).

hopefully this is the right forum in which to post this query -- couldn't find a more general support forum.


thanks.

[mmorse]

Welcome to the forums,
-How about sending the standard email? When they accept via the buttons given at the top of the email it'll auto add the share to their list. (see attached pics of the process)
-If you have terminal access (I kinda doubt you have this) there's Zmmailbox - Zimbra :: Wiki which can be scripted to do that work. Perhaps 01 could setup a portal for you to do this or something.
-You can also vote for Bug 7473 - Share management and discovery (have a page in preferences that show all the shared items available to a user)

[ragaskar]

Ah, ok, so the answer is that technically it should.

The standard email wasn't sending out for our distro lists OR individual users and was instead popping up an unknown address error when we tried to share a folder, but that's a bug I'll file with 01.com (maybe later this week when they've ironed out all the upgrade issues).

Good to know! Thanks for your quick response to this issue.