Address book, subscribe to a remote VCard .vcf file

[batfastad]

Hi everyone

Just wondering what everyone thinks of the idea of having remote .vcf support.
The ability to create a new Address List in Zimbra, but it actually syncs with a .vcf. In terms of the Zimbra interface, it could operate in exactly the same way as subscribing to remote calendars.
I think that would be mega-cool

Anyone else think that would be cool?

I posted about this in /etc (Remote .ics, check! Has anyone thought about remote VCards/.vcf?) but thought I'd put in a proper feature suggestion here.

At the moment we have a few .vcf files that we periodically download to refresh various address lists. The .vcf files are generated from our company contacts database on our intranet server (PHP/MySQL), and this works really well because you can store many individual contacts within a single .vcf
The connection to our intranet is obviously SSL and protected by HTTP basic auth.

dkarp made an excellent point in my other thread though... there's no unique ID in the VCard spec. Which would mean the entire address list would have to be cleared and re-loaded from the VCard file.
Whereas with .ics you can update specific events because each event contains its own ID.

I think remote .vcf files could be a really cool feature. It would be cool for us anyway , having our various company email lists stored in Zimbra and periodically refreshed with new data.

Comments/suggestions?

Thanks, B

[batfastad]

Not such a popular suggestion then eh!?

[batfastad]

Anyone else think this would be a mega-cool feature?
Then you could set up a shared address list, which Zimbra syncs a few times a day!
I've made an entry in bugzilla Bug 31410 – Subscribe to remote VCard vcf as address list for everyone to vote for

[batfastad]

Any thoughts or further interest/support for this sort of feature?
It would be absolutely amazing for us if this feature existed!