Zimbra

mmenaz · #1 (**permalink**) 05-27-2009, 03:16 PM

Hi, I've users that are used to Outlook address book and "grouping" and tagging and we have replaced their exchange with zimbra OS.
I have to admint that, apart OL habbit, ZWC management of address book looks really weak for real work needs.
I'm wondering if I miss some hidden zimbra features, so I ask here.
They have grouped their customers in differen Address Books. They thought that once migrated to zimbra would have been easy build Contact Groups selecting emails from them, or select destination from them, but is not the case, apparently.
a) if you create a new Contact Group, you can't define a single Address Book to pick your emails from, it searches among ALL of your address book, so is almost impossible for them to pick up the correct addresses among 1,000 that were previously "categorized" among 15 address boooks
b) you can't select an address book and send mail to all of the contacts it has, or create a Contact Group from it
c) you can't even select multiple contacts from an address book (even if in the same page!) and right click a "send mail to".

How can this problem be solved? What about if I would like to send an email to people in a certain address book that have a certain tag or belong to a certain company?

I do hope I'm missing something, thanks for the help!

edwin.arneson · #2 (**permalink**) 06-02-2009, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mmenaz

a) if you create a new Contact Group, you can't define a single Address Book to pick your emails from, it searches among ALL of your address book, so is almost impossible for them to pick up the correct addresses among 1,000 that were previously "categorized" among 15 address boooks

Various parts of Zimbra are treated better or worse. Mail is a first class citizen, and the other components are various other classes (second, third, fourth, etc.). The search function quite powerful, and while Mail gets the best search treatment, it works OK for the other components. Presuming you have Zimbra version 5, after you've select "New Contact Group" and specified "In 'Contacts'" in the right hand section, then in the "Find" box, enter a search command. If the Address Book is named "Abc" then enter "in:Abc" to find contacts in only that Address Book.

See Query Language Description for more info.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mmenaz

b) you can't select an address book and send mail to all of the contacts it has, or create a Contact Group from it

No you can't. But, when composing an e-mail message, click the "To" button. With "Show names from" set to "Contacts" type the search command (e.g. in:Abc) to get the list and select them all. Not quick and easy, but not too bad either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mmenaz

[...]What about if I would like to send an email to people in a certain address book that have a certain tag or belong to a certain company?[...]

For the former: in:abname tag:tagname
For the latter: in:abname "company name"

The latter shows the mail-centric nature of the search function, in that if you have populated the "Company" field, you can't just search it using 'company:"company name".' You have to search the entire contact which may find records with other fields populated with that value if the text matches.

Note that there is a "company" keyword documented by Zimbra (Raw List_of Search Parameters) but it doesn't search the "Company" field of a contact.

mmenaz · #3 (**permalink**) 06-03-2009, 03:33 PM

Thanks a lot for the very usefull info! Unfortunatly neither mail was good enough for last client we tried to install Zimbra, so we have to remove it and install a new version of his previous M$ server solution. Many problems came from Zimbra limits, many from ZWC or ZDesktop ones, but at the end the client was unable to work flawlessy as it did with OL and screamed to be put back.
To be sincere, in many regards I had to admint that he was right. Fortunatly part of the problems seem have gone with the forecoming Zimbra 6.0 (i.e. ZWC able to notify events/email popping up in screen, e-mail confirmation read receip, and some more). Unfortunatly, many that seem easy to fix are still there (i.e. you can't posticipate an event of 24 or 48 or whatever you like hours, the limit is 18. Also you can't be notified in advance of more than 18 hours... sigh)