GNOME Evolution <-> ZCS Contacts

[krsears]

This is driving me crazy. I have a production system that has been running with Sendmail, dovecot, and GNOME Evolution for well over 7 years for many users. Unfortunately, we have outgrown Evolution and I am trying to test Zimbra in a parallel setup. I have dedicated a server machine running CentOS7 and have installed ZImbra. I can do everything from within Zimbra without problem (mail is not going out or in due to the true MTA running on the original server) including accessing the Zimbra system from outside. I have a problem that is driving me nuts: I cannot for the life of me get GNOME Evolution to connect to the Zimbra to get access to the contacts.

I have created a 3100+ entry contact list in the admin account and shared that with 2 users (will be more *IF* I can get this working). I have tried following all of the internet setups for connecting to Zimbra's LDAP (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc) but I cannot get Evolution to make a connection. I need to be able to have Evolution both read/write to the contacts list. These contacts are used for the email system for auto-complete and address lookup for general purpose. Few of the entries are users within the organization. If these need to be loaded differently that is fine so long as they can be added and edited by everyone in the organization.

I have wasted days trying to get this working.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Kendall