enterprise ZCO deployment

[west]

We wish to deploy the ZCO, using GPO or similar, onto 100+ Windows 7 64-bit desktops, running Microsoft Office 2010.

While we can deploy the .msi via GPO without any problems, when users start up Outlook for the first time, Outlook defaults to trying to set up an Exchange-based profile for them, instead of creating a Zimbra profile.

The documentation provided with the ZCO only seems to cover a user-based install.

We've tried the unsupported Zimbra profile creator (CreateZimbraProfile - Zimbra :: Wiki), but it does not appear to work under Windows 7 64-bit.

Surely there must be a supported enterprise deployment option for profile creation with using the ZCO?

We're using the latest version of Zimbra, and the supplied ZCO (7.1.2).

Any tips appreciated.

[dpitt]

> Surely there must be a supported enterprise deployment option for profile creation with using the ZCO?
I don't think there is.
Is manual creation of Zimbra profiles working correctly?

[west]

Originally Posted by dpitt

> Surely there must be a supported enterprise deployment option for profile creation with using the ZCO?
I don't think there is.
Is manual creation of Zimbra profiles working correctly?

Manual creation (ie, Settings -> Control Panel -> Mail -> etc.) works fine. It's just not feasible to do this by hand for 100+ accounts.

[dave_kempe]

I have a few suggestions, some you have probably considered:

Did you look at the msi customiser and see how that works? If thats not enough, I would look into scripting a MAPI profile creation with NSIS, or whatever other favourite tool you like.
Once you have zimbra loaded on the machine, the default install prompts the user on first login for their username and password. You can just customise the msi with the servername and other settings, and roll it out. Perhaps you have some exchange GPO stuff in your AD? When we do it, the msi creates a zimbra profile and sets it default (with no info).

[west]

Originally Posted by dave_kempe

I have a few suggestions, some you have probably considered:

Did you look at the msi customiser and see how that works?

We already use the customiser to set the default server details, and that works fine. I can't see any way in which the customiser would allow one to create profiles though; am I missing something?

If thats not enough, I would look into scripting a MAPI profile creation with NSIS, or whatever other favourite tool you like.

I'm familiar with NSIS, and with creating MAPI profiles for Exchange accounts. However, I'm not sure how one would be able to do this for Zimbra accounts. I've been unable to find any examples of this (all examples seem to be Exchange only), nor any mention of anyone else doing this. Do you have some pointers?

Once you have zimbra loaded on the machine, the default install prompts the user on first login for their username and password. You can just customise the msi with the servername and other settings, and roll it out. Perhaps you have some exchange GPO stuff in your AD? When we do it, the msi creates a zimbra profile and sets it default (with no info).

We're testing with an empty tree, so there should not be any existing Exchange details in the AD. I'll double check this again though. Thanks.

There is now also an open ticket on the issue here:

https://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=64360