Connector adventures

[vogon1]

Hi,

I finally got the connector working.
My guess is that most of the problems were caused by myself, but maybe my adventures are useful for other people.

- Installing the connector on a machine with office/outlook 2000 is refused.
- I installed Office 2003 Dutch, then installed the connector
- The outlook profile only had a local .pst file
- I configured the connector via extra -> email accounts
- Now, outlook keeps on crashing when starting the first sync. A popup appears suggesting sending an error message to Microsoft. I thought there is no point in doing that, so I never did.
The crashes happen after a few SOAP posts. It would be nice if the connector gave an error message instead of crashing outlook.
- The solution was to go to the extra -> email accounts screen, and select in the drop-down box that new mail must be delivered to the zimbra account. Once that was done, I could sync.

- I have a list of contacts in outlook, and I just dragged them from the standard contact list to the Zimbra contact list.
The contacts appeared in outlook in the Zimbra contact list, but didn't show up on the server. Then I deleted the contacts in the Zimbra list, and then I got a pop-up for every contact saying the delete failed on the server because the contact was not there. This is reproduceable, also with a single entry dropped in the Zimbra folder.

- I cannot, or don't know how to, view someone else's calendar on the Zimbra server from within Outlook.

- There were lots of deleted emails on the server (150 or so), so I told outlook to purge the deleted items. 6 emails gave a pop-up, and remained on the server. I deleted them there. I didn't save the soap messages .

Besides the above, things looked very well. New, changed or deleted mail, appointments and contacts are sync'd as they should.

- Then my linux workstation crashed, and thus also the vmware machine with Zimbra in it because it was running on my workstation. I decided to go back to a snapshot of the zimbra machine, and try a few other things.
I never got the connector running again until I removed outlook and my user outlook directory, and re-installed. There must have been some state in the configuration files that could not cope with the jump back in time on the zimbra server.
As before, outlook keeps on crashing after some SOAP messages have been sent, and it is really hard to find out what causes these crashes. It would be a major improvement if the connector would give an error message instead of crashing outlook.

- What is the best way to 'reset' the zimbra data for a user, forcing a first sync? That might have been helpful.

Despite the above (it still is beta), I am happy with the connector.

Sietse

[sam]

I configured the connector via extra -> email accounts

This is currently not supported in Beta 1. You need to create a new profile consisting of a single Zimbra service. Refer to the documentation.

I cannot, or don't know how to, view someone else's calendar on the Zimbra server from within Outlook.

Delegation is not in Beta 1. We are actively working on delegation.

There were lots of deleted emails on the server (150 or so), so I told outlook to purge the deleted items. 6 emails gave a pop-up, and remained on the server. I deleted them there. I didn't save the soap messages.

No soap, no hope We have seen an issue where deleting causes an NPE on the server. This is most likely what you experienced. We have a bug open on this.

It would be a major improvement if the connector would give an error message instead of crashing outlook.

For the beta, we decided to allow crashing so we can collect core dumps. With the core dumps we can quickly identify the root cause. PM me if you are still seeing the crashes.

- What is the best way to 'reset' the zimbra data for a user, forcing a first sync? That might have been helpful.

Create a new profile.