Last year we brought shared mail folders into play to join the rest of the sharing possibilities ZCS offers, but we don’t want to overlook mentioning another feature in 5.0 that has some excellent use cases.
Let’s say you need to collaborate with an assistant (who of course manages everything for you). While sharing is recursive to sub-folders by default, depending on account structure it can mean several invites and checks to make sure everyone is seeing the proper info. Other cavets include the occasional inability for the sharee to mentally organize / conceptually visualize the sharer’s folder structure scheme, or the possible need to keep the permissions and mountpoints updated when content is moved a lot. Nothing stings like missing important information when someone shifts material into folders that aren’t actually shared according to plan; everyone can become instantly out-of-sync.
Admins know that sharing the entirety of an account can be achieved through modifyFolderGrant & createMountpoint requests. This process previously had a few downsides, like avoiding name conflicts when trying to mount the root of the account ‘all at once’ (fixed in ZCS 5.0.6+).
There are a few RFE’s in the works, such as the ability to share an entire mailbox in one click or to expose custom share roles end-user side. We’re also planning to bring clarity to your web of shares through a single-user share management UI followed by the larger share management and discovery and a new Zimlet as well, but there’s one other cool trick that’s here right now: Family Mailboxes
Don’t let the name deceive you – we’ve used the concept of parent/child relationships, yet this principle can easily apply to any primary/secondary setup such as boss/secretary, professor/assistants, or manager/co-worker/peers; where sharing of passwords is inappropriate or you don’t want another browser session open, yet you still need full control. (Wildcard sub-domains aren’t for everyone, and an additional browser can equal a bit more memory used.)
To get started via CLI (if you’re an end-user ask your admin about configuring it):
zmprov ga secondary@domain.com | grep zimbraId
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}
We also want the secondary account visible in the accordion UI of the primary:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com +zimbraPrefChildVisibleAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}
(The primary user can also set this later from their AJAX client preferences tab.)
Just like how the Zimbra Desktop’s UI works, you now have access to mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, notebooks, briefcase items, and even preferences of the secondary account:
A few notes:
- As shown above – when replying from an account that’s not yours, emails include a header designating who it was really sent by & “on behalf of” is displayed. It’s also shown as unread in the sent folder of the account owner so they’re made aware of it.
- This is a little different than permissions & mountpoints – so you’ll have to use normal shares if you need access in other end-clients; it requires the AJAX interface for functionality, and currently isn’t available in the HTML web-client.
- Don’t go overboard on visible secondary accounts, our share model covers almost every situation; but as many organizations have a few crucial duos or teams who need to be on the same page every moment – this is there for those who have no time to mess with share permissions and need to manage other users, or perhaps desire complete control in a hosted family account.
To remove, simply replace the plus sign with a minus:
zmprov ma primary@domain.com -zimbraChildAccount {zimbraIdSecondary}
Have other ideas to improve work flow or make Zimbra family friendly? (Like parental mail screening, the ability for end-users to provision in HSP situations, or even admin console settings?) Then let us know below or drop in over at the community forums.
EDUCAUSE 08 that is.
We’re big proponents of bringing the latest technology to students and faculty, because countless organizations enjoy using our software in the classroom – as both a communication tool and to teach. So of course we’ll be at this year’s annual EDUCAUSE conference in Orlando, FL from Oct 28th to 31st.
If you’re going, be sure to swing by booth #213 to chat about the future of collaboration, grab a bite to eat with us at Seasons 52 Grill on Wednesday evening (contact us if you’re interested), and drop in for “Feel the Spirit” on Thursday night; which we are co-hosting this year over at Universal Studio’s CityWalk.
If you missed the Xythos webinar yesterday we’ll have the screencast up soon, but you can also play with their awesome new Zimlet in booth #833.
Be sure to check out the events page for more info, and to see other places we’ll be.
A year an a half ago the (tiny) Yahoo! Calendar team embarked on a mission to build a new Calendar. We were interested in cracking the consumer market where huge potential for growth and innovation lay. The problem was that the 10 year old platform was falling apart and being held together by bungee cord and tape. Innovation on this platform would have been very challenging and forever handicap our efforts going forward.
Zimbra came into the Yahoo! fold and along with it a huge opportunity (large short-term technical challenges as well!) Zimbra’s underlying technology is ripe for customization, and the Yahoo! Calendar Team dove in and came up with some fantastic results.
The all new Yahoo! Calendar Beta is running an a Zimbra back-end which has been embedded into the Yahoo! architecture, with a brand-spanking new front-end composed of JSP enhancements, a new taglib, YUI, and of course AJAX.
 
This is an early beta product where we focused on getting the fundamentals right first. In coming releases expect to see some exciting enhancements. Our Flickr integration is a hint at where we are taking calendaring; its functionality exposes the power of calendars to be a window to discovering interesting events and content, as well as a window to the past.
 
The teams working together from one code repository was an awesome experience, and this cooperation will continue to bring much more innovation across the Yahoo! network. Lots of great calendar code and ideas have come out of this collaboration, look for some in upcoming ZCS releases or check some out in the main branch in perforce.
How can you get on board early? Just visit: switch.calendar.yahoo.com
Checkout some screencasts of the new calendar in action is here, and a video of Scott Dietzen discussing it on All things Digital.
What else are we up to? John Holder is playing host for CalConnect Roundtable XIII this week at one of Yahoo!’s campuses in Santa Carla, CA – we’re collaborating with some big corporations including Sun, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, Kerio, as well as some major university’s to bring the latest CalDAV & iCalendar specs your way.
Herbert Wang is a Product Manager on the Zimbra-Yahoo! Calendaring Team.
Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 added a wealth of new features to our offline capable client, and Beta 4 expands upon it’s good taste.
Build 1338 introduces:
 Global Address List access against a ZCS server (both proxy and sync).
 Free-busy information proxy for ZCS users, to assist in finding that open timeslot on your colleague’s calendar.
 Archiving: Users can now move items under “Local Folders” should they need to keep their server mailbox size under quota, or just wish to not sync certain items.
 Resource &  Location scheduling UI for Zimbra accounts.
 Yahoo! Address Book integration: Another frequent request – you can enable contact sync under Setup > Account Settings.
 Microsoft Live/Hotmail Plus: This one was not even on the book, but we decided to implement mail sync via the JDAVMail API and a custom setup wizard just for the kick of it.
 In addition to secure cookie auth, we managed to implement complete SSL for all IMAP communication with Yahoo! accounts as well.
 Various UI changes to support the new enhancements, and latest code to go along with the parallel ZCS 5.0.10 release.
Per your excellent feedback, calendar sync integration with several providers is coming soon. Enjoy this release!
If it’s not available to you via auto-update yet, you haven’t been building from source, or are even just discovering it for the first time, you can download the installer here for Linux, Windows, or Mac.
Have an idea for Zimbra Desktop or just want a tweak built upon these new components? We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on it below or over in the Community Forums.
One of the more nifty features to grace the Zimbra scene recently is the interoperability framework for sharing two-way free/busy information with other server platforms.
Since we released the framework APIs and the reference implementation against Microsoft’s Exchange 2003 (previously covered) there has been a lot of interest from customers and community (interop works with both Open Source and Network Edition).
Argonne National Labs has given excellent feedback culminating in a few enhancements for ZCS 5.0.10. We also recently got a wonderful thank you note from the University of Pennsylvania, who teamed up with the folks over at Sumatra Development to handle some calendar migrations. They were impressed at how well their multi-domain environment behaved, and shared a link to a configuration tip for Exchange 2007. It’s great to see the community enhance, extend, and tweak the open source interop framework.
That type of integration cohesiveness frequently makes Zimbra relevant to organizations in the same way that other open source business application are: often initially at the division level, and then spreading within the enterprise. (Penn breaks their IT into “local support providers” to better serve each school’s specialized needs.) For immense corporations wanting to switch from software such as Exchange, Lotus, Meeting Maker, or other third-parties that interact with our API, picking a new platform can be a massive undertaking – having interop can mean a safe departmental decision.
Admins out there can certainly attest the the headaches involved with maintaining different server infrastructures, but it also works in reverse – that ’stubborn group’ which doesn’t want to switch or the ‘peer organization running different software’ can now seamlessly communicate as one.
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