GAL not syncronized with Outlook Connector

[CatiaL]

Hello,

we use zimbra (4.0.3) with the outlook connector as mail system.

I have e problem with the synchronization of the GAL informations (tel #, addres
s, company etc) with outlook.

I open the web interface as root to set the information of the users.
I set pro user tel #, company name, address etc.....
I save the user changes, close.
I logout.

If I login as a user belonging to the domain in the web zimbra interface I see t
he GAL informations that I have set.

If I open outlook as a user belonging to the domain, no matter if I close & reop
en outlook or if I click "Send/Receive" to synchronize the I see no or only a pa
rt of the GAL informations that I have set.

I have saw an article about this thema:
"Changes make to the "GAL" take effect in the webUI immediatly. For connector, h
owever, it takes 24 hours for the changes to appear."

but actually in my case it looks like even after more than 24 hours nothing appe
rars (why 24 hours?). Moreover the fix for this problem which is described in th
e article is on the client side ... is there no way to fix the problem on the se
rver side once for ever without having to annoy each user?

Any idea/help would be very appreciated!

p.s. I have another small question:
say the user userA is registered as userA and has 2 aliases userA1 userA2. In th
e GAL of Outlook I would see 3 times userA with the same properties except the e
-mail address

userA (userA, ......)
userA (userA1, .....)
userA (userA2, .....)

which looks to me rather annoying. Is there no way to change this and have only
one user shown?

thanks again

[sam]

Every time you open outlook it attempts to retrieve any changes made to the GAL. I searched the forum but didn't find the article you referred to. Can you include a link?

The outlook GAL chooser dialog appears to show you the same user multiple times because it is showing email addresses you can send to. There is indeed only 1 entry in the GAL, but outlook is expanding the single entry to multiple entries to give you the opportunity to pick which address to send to.

[CatiaL]

Hello,

I know that the "theory" says that everytime I open outlook it should syncronize with the server (or to force the sync I have to click on Send/Receive).

This procedure works for what concernes other "stuff" (e-mails etc).

Unfortunatelly in practice I do not get the GAL correctly syncronized in a predictable way.

Sometimes outlook close/open works, and I get the right tel, address etc.
Sometimes I get the right tel a part of the address and the other part of the address is showed up only if I click o the "Address" button but is not shown spontaneously.
Even worst and not predictable is the situation on the aliases: most of the times I do not get any info (tel, address, etc) in outlook.

The link to the article I was mentioning is the following:

http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?tit...ector_GAL_sync

For what concerns the multiple entries in the listing, I understand why it happens but I think it would be anyway better to have only one entry and then into the single entry a multiple choice of e-mail addresses.

[sam]

The best way to see exactly whats going on is to turn on ZCO logging. You'll see that every time it is loaded it calls SyncGalRequest on the server. You can look at the response from the server to see if it has detected the GAL changes. Is there anything special about the entries that have problems?

The data on that wiki page actually does not apply to ZCO at all. I'll have that taken care of.

We are planning to implement our own address book provider which means we get to decide what the UI for GAL entries will look like. At that point we can address the issue with multiple listings being displayed.

[fverbeek]

I believe I found why this problem appears.

In order to limit the download size of the GAL from the LDAP server, zimbra adds a filter that looks like
(|(whenmodified>[some time ago])(whencreated >[some time ago]))

On Active Directory, entries bear a whenChanged attribute.
The GAL sync initiated by the connector use a filter with the whenModified attribute, that never matches, the query always come back as matching no entry.

Playing around with the mapping for whenModified in zmprov mcf didn't solve the issue.

I don't know whether there is a way to change the attribute used in that case.

Francois

[Rich Graves]

Have you (or anyone else) figured out a workaround for properly updating the GAL, short of dumping the entire Outlook profile?

If not, I'll open a support case.