Blackberry integration

[Kirkaiya]

Thanks for continuing to work on the OTA solution. I'm getting ready to ditch my older WinCE 4.2 phone for a QTek 8500 (aka HTC StrTrk) phone that has Windows Mobile 5.0, and supports "Exchange Push Email".

I'm sure you guys have long ago dissected the Exchange (SP2) "push" functionality; I've read a little bit about it (it uses http-requests to sort of 'poll' the server, I think?).

Anyway - is the eventual Zimbra push-email solution going to mimick or be compatible with the Windows mobile clients that can talk to Exchange SP2, or... is there anything else you can tell us about it? I have ZCS NE 3.12 (upgrading them to 3.13 in an hour from now), and have not reviewed the source-code to see how the beta OTA sync works in Zimbra.

I couldn't find anything searching the wiki (searched things like "OTA", "push email", etc). If I missed it, just let me know :-)

[KevinH]

We plan to support this push capability at some point in the future. For now it's pull/poll based. Not a perfect push setup but works rather well and for at least for the devices we've tested on even a very aggressive poll frequency is efficient on battery life.

[Kirkaiya]

Just thought you guys might like to know, I bought a new WM5 smartphone last week (it's made by HTC, the version I have is the Dopod S300, but it's also called the Qtek 8500, and referred to as the "Star Trek" or HTC StrTrk).

Anyway - I set up one of my Zimbra servers as the "server source" for syncing calendar and contacts, and it worked great (and pretty fast over the 200 kbps EDGE connection the phone has). I also set up an IMAP account, and that also worked flawlessly (less suprising, since I had already tested IMAP from Outlook and other desktop clients).

I'm very much looking forward to the full Calendar/Contacts/Email OTA sync that is coming in the 3.2 release, but I'm willing to wait until it's stable.

For the push email - has anyone managed to set up their Zimbra to do the special sms message that tells the WM5 smartphone to log in and sync (the "Always Up To Date, or AUTD feature)?

My phone also support the "Direct Push" from Exchange, but I have no idea if what is under development is going to be compatible with that or not. I think scheduled syncs will work for me, and most people, although having it all be via ActiveSync rather than AS + IMAP will be great.

So anyway - you can add the HTC StrTrk to the list of phones that this (OTA ActiveSync & IMAP) works well on.

[KevinH]

We don't support the 'always on' or 'connected' mode yet. It's planned though.

[mporter]

BES New Update:
http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/....html#comments


Cheers,
Matthew

[adobrin]

is there no funambol plugin in the works? :*(

[Klug]

Originally Posted by adobrin

is there no funambol plugin in the works? :*(

Do a search on "funambol" on the forum, you'll get some answers.

[azilber]

Originally Posted by KevinH

If it was easy everybody would offer this. We are working on a couple solutions. We'll release it when it's ready for beta. You can do OTA IMAP for mail and use Outlook for calendar/contacts so it's usable today. Several of us work this way today. Not perfect but gets the job done. We'll provide a timeline once we have the technical details complete and are nearing a beta.

Is this using Zimbra Mobile for OTA IMAP or just Zimbra itself? I've been trying to get BIS to work with our zimbra over ssl and it wouldn't work. We are using Zimbra 4.5.1 NE and imap over ssl (which the bis supports).

-Alex

[KevinH]

BlackBerry Info on the Zimbra Wiki

Zimbra Blackberry

[e1ven]

Has anyone found a way to do Blackberry/Zimbra integration without going through NotifyCorp?

With all due respect to NotifyCorp, their product just doesn't work very well. Messages take forever to arrive, no matter how low we set the Poll settings to be. It seems that their solution isn't really a true push solution at all- It needs to poll the server frequently, and drains quite a bit of battery.

If we need to poll anyway, I'd rather just do IMAP... It's not ideal, but NotifyLink just isn't working well for us.

Has anyone come up with another solution? If we have to, we could just text-message everyone, but that doesn't sync contacts/calendars and it's limited in length.


ANY solutions appreciated. Zimbra- Let us pay you instead
-Colin