Zimbra using Exchange 2003 or 2007 MAPI protocols

[mlanner]

Hi,

Does anyone know if Zimbra NE is using Exchange 2003 or 2007 MAPI protocols?

Thanks in advance.

[Rich Graves]

Neither. The Outlook connector syncs PSTs with a Zimbra-specific XML/SOAP protocol. Outlook 2007 has been supported since January 2008, and all major features work with the exception of task delegation/assignment and out-of-office assistant.

The Windows Mobile/ActiveSync support is currently WM5/2003-ish, i.e., no Tasks or HTML, though Blackberries and iPhones get around that. ZCS6, due Q3 (I'd wait til Q4), promises full WM6+ support including remote wipe.

If perfect Outlook support is critical to you, you might want to look elsewhere. There are at least two Exchange alternatives that advertise "real" MAPI support. Even though about half the Outlook problems I'm seeing now are Microsoft's problem (Outlook is very fragile in the face of ical sent from groupwise, etc.), the additional ZCO sync layer complicates troubleshooting.

[mlanner]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the input. Actually, none of that is a big issue for me. The reason I was asking was because I was curious, mostly because one of my new users is using a dev build of Mac OS X 10.6. He was trying to use the built-in Exchange support in Apple Mail that comes with 10.6.

I know, I know ... it's totally unsupported at this point ... we were just trying to see if we could make it work. So, I was simply fishing for some info to see if I could better understand it.

On your Outlook note, though, for the most part the ZCO works just fine for most of my users.

[fsiegel]

FWIW, the Out of Office Assistant will be available in ZCO version 5.0.17, coming out in a few weeks

[Rich Graves]

The "real" Out of Office Assistant, or will that menu item be replaced with a zimbra-specific dialog, like filters?

Either would be great; just wondering, as the bugzilla thread discusses both.

[fsiegel]

"Real", of course is a metaphysical concept :-) I like to thing we are intrinsically real. The menu item will have a Zimbra specific dialog that is quite similar to the vacation reply stuff in the Zimbra Web client (since it's the Zimbra server's capability that we are using). It will allow you to set whether it is on or off, the message, and the start and end dates. It will be available via Tools->Out of Office Assistant...