Support for user-managed locations and resources?

[ab5602]

Would anyone else like to see user-managed resources and locations?

The current admin-only management systems works, but it seems designed for an institution who has a fairly small # of resources to manage. We have people very excited about using the resource management ability of Zimbra, especially our Library group. These kinds of resources would include:

- Projectors/AV equip.
- Classrooms
- Conference Rooms
- Study Rooms
- Vehicles
- Event Locations
- Buildings
- Rare Books/Materials
- Lab equipment (think scanning electron microscopes & such)

The # of resources at our EDU could easily escalate into the 10's of thousands and I'm a bit worried that I'm going to have to write an interface to zmprov, to allow users to create/edit/manage these themselves somehow.

Seems like it would be nice to be able to create resource groups in the admin panel like "Library Resources", and then delegate authority to a small # of users to create/edit/manage resources in this group, through their regular UI.

[ab5602]

BTW: After searching around bugzilla, I could not find a bug/enhancement that was like this, so I created a new one:

Bug 27549 - Delegate users to manage resources through regular UI

[mmorse]

Bug 12261 - resource/location owner-manager
Bug 12414 - Improve overall user experience of setting up and using calendar resource that doesn't automatically accept/decline

Till those are done - some choose to:
1. Login to admin console and edit the resource.
2. Disable auto-accept. (Or still allow auto accept if free, but don't know if you want that in a library situation as you probably want human interaction before stuff is assigned/checked-out).
3. Login to web client as the resource.
4. Share the calendar with human administrator user.

[ab5602]

Thanks for the reply, but, these bugs allow resources that already exist to be managed easier/better, but they don't seem to cover resource creation/deletion.

I don't know if this would be feasible, but what I'm envisioning looks like:

1) Creating a tab for "resource groups" in the admin panel. Every resource is assigned a group.

2) Adding the ability to flag a user as a "resource administrator" for specific resource group(s) in the admin panel.

3) If a user is a resource administrator for a resource group, they essentially will have the functionality that exist in the admin panel (see attached), available to them in the regular UI. This would include the ability to create/delete resources in their "resource group".

These resources could be automatically given standard names/accounts to simplify the user interface like:

resourcegroup_resourcename@domain.com

The idea here would be to delegate administration of resources to these "resource administrators", in order to get the Zimbra administrators out of the business of creating/managing/deleting resources at an atomic level.

Again, until something like this exists, I will probably need to write some sort of webpage that essentially allows any employee to (only for resource accounts) to:

zmprov [add|delete|modify] resource@domain.com
....

This wouldn't really be a 100%, but would get the job done.

[mmorse]

Removed dupe/redirected it for you: Bug 27549 - departmental resources & admins (prefer management in regular UI)

[ab5602]

Thanks for annotating the bugs, etc. Until we can come up with a web-based interface to zmprov, I found a round-about way to delegate resource management to users:

1) DNS a subdomain called something like: resources.domain.com
2) Add this subdomain to the list of domains in the Zimbra Admin UI
3) Set the maximum # of accounts for the new domain to 2 (can't be 1: bug: Bug 9229 - resources should not count against the licensed user count)
4) Create a user in the domain called something like: manager@resources.domain.com
5) Make this user a Domain Administrator for resources.domain.com
6) Give this Admin UI account to a delegated person, so they can manage the resources under that domain name.

Drawbacks:
- Requires a user license for each manager@resource.domain.com account
- Have to DNS a subdomain for every resource manager to work in.
- User has to login to the the manager@resource.domain.com account to manage resources
- The resource managers may try and muck around with aliases, distribution lists and new accounts, but aren't going to accomplish too much, due to the account limit.

Like I said, it's kind of a hack, but we'll work with it until we can get something better in place!

[glassman]

What I want to know is if there is a possibility of creating a resource and making it searchable it both the Find Location and Find Resource tab when creating a new appointment in Zimbra Webmail calendar.

[Chewie71]

Have you all seen this new Zimlet?

Get or contribute Zimlets, UI themes, and languages in the Zimbra Gallery - Resource Administrator

Matt