Shared address book on iphone

[nargzul]

Hi everyone!

I get some trouble to get a shared address book working on Iphone.

The problematic:

An enterprise wants to have an address book where they can have all address of customers.

I've tried to create a new address book, and I've shared it to every user of this domain. It works great on the zimbra interface, and with the thunderbird+zindus, but on the Iphone, no way :s.

After this I've hoped that I can create a GAL, or put external person in the GAL, because of personn of the GAL are correctly syncronized on the Iphone.

So my questions:
-Is there a way to get the shared address book working on Iphone(I suppose that the problem will be the same on windows mobile)
or
-Can we add external people into the GAL, how?
or
-How to get a synchronized contacts list on the Iphone by an other way?

Thank you!

[ewilen]

Partial answer to your question is that shared address books are not available using ActiveSync. This is a limitation of the ActiveSync protocol: Bug 30950 – iphone: sync with shared contacts and calendars

When Apple implements CardDav on the iPhone, you might have a way. This will of course also require Apple & Zimbra to work out kinks in their respective implementations of CardDav. At least for MacOS Address Book, this hasn't happened yet: Bug 22008 – WebDAV: Add support for CardDav

I don't know about getting external people into the GAL.

The only other way of synching a contacts list I can think of might be to hack up a script that will periodically copy from a master list into each individual's account.

You could also experiment with IMAP. It's not pretty but Zimbra for some reason exposes your Address Books via IMAP. So if it does this for shared Address Books that you've mounted...and if the iPhone mounts the resulting folder, you could at least make the information available that way.

Hm, another method I thought of: put the list into a separate LDAP server and have iPhone access that. You might be able script things so that you can automate copying from the shared list on Zimbra into the LDAP server.