Oracle Calendar to Zimbra pain

[jwtadmin]

We are planning to migrate our 900+ Oracle Calendar base to Zimbra and I am having some feature loss issues.

Primarily this is around the culture differences between Oracle Calendar and Zimbra (or an exchange like calendar). Right now users can view other calendars easily by clicking the open calendar button at the top of the client. When they open it they can see any meeting event that has an ACL for any unlisted person or just blocks of time for private meetings.

It is the norm for people to just book your time in calendar without asking, if they see you have some time free, they just book it. Some people will use blocks in their calendar (blocks of time place in calendar to dissuade meetings from being scheduled) and often managers or VP's will see this and book against it knowing they can double book you. Yes this can be annoying but it is the culture.

In Zimbra it feels like you are scheduling blind, all you can see is little bars indicating free/busy. If you specifically share out (and the user accepts) your calendar you can see EVERYTHING and the schedule tab shows meeting names, but that is not feasible for all 900 users.

You can make your calendar public, but there is no indication in the zimbra client that you have a public calendar, i.e. you can't just search for it or right click on someone and see it. Also if you share out your calendar to public EVERYONE will see it and all the details. The default on a meeting is public not private. The free busy calendar is only in ifb format not html.

Has anyone else made the transition from OCS to Zimbra? How did your users react to the change in culture?

I searched for RFE's on some of my gripes but I didn't see any. If there are some that I missed in my search please post, otherwise I'll file them.

John Turner

[p24t]

Well, the way calendar invites go in ZCS, you can invite someone to a meeting, and it puts it in their calendar. However, they get an email that allows them the option to accept/reject/tentative.

I don't know of any RFE's to have more visibility on the calendar, but here's one about looking for available shared items:

Bug 7473 - Share management and discovery

[Rich Graves]

"The free busy calendar is only in ifb format not html." -- Is too; use /home/jwtadmin?fmt=freebusy

This was added in 5.0.2. It won't be as nice as the ocal fat cliient, but consider a web form, a zimlet, or even a link from your online directory results page so that your users don't have to "just know" the URL.

Note that this URL is globally accessible, and there is currently no way to turn it off.

Emulating the ocal behavior (show details if perms allow, otherwise fb only) is substantially complicated by the concept of multiple personal calendars. There are several related RFEs, though, a couple of them specifically referencing ocal migration.

[Rich Graves]

Bug 18386 - Publish user free-busy info on web page
Bug 27459 - RFE - Ability for anyone (not just people with a share) to view some meeting details of resources
Bug 7174 - Free/Busy Screen for Several People
Bug 6410 - departmental calendar grouping
Bug 27420 - departmental calendar grouping not working

[jwtadmin]

Thanks Rich for pointing me to the /home/username?fmt=freebusy that's quite nice.

I thought I had seen that someplace before, but lost it along the way.

I like the idea of implementing this via a zimlet. In fact I suppose if I had the skills I could code an OCS emulator for meeting creation in Zimbra that would show you public calendars or free busy times for your attendees and suggest the best option.