Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders:
- Conference calls are every Tuesday and open to all using either the FreeConferenceCall.com VoIP app or via a dial-in number: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance
- Each week’s call agenda can be found at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... jMuGGtIl7J
- Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome.
Safari 14.0.2 Issues With Zimbra
Mark S. said that after updating to Safari 14.0.2, as part of the MacOS upgrade to Big Sur, he has noticed that, for mailboxes with two-factor authentication enabled, Safari sometimes fails to proceed past the Zimbra Web Client login page to the two-factor authentication page. In other cases, Safari crashes about once per week, and he has found that he cannot scroll in certain places in the Zimbra Admin Console, or there are screen painting issues. Cine commented that he has a friend, who is an Apple developer, and they have indicated that the most recent release of Safari has some known memory management issues. Apple is reportedly trying to decide if they should release a one-off patch to address these issues, or if they should wait for the next patch roll-up to be released. Noah P. said that he too has experienced some of these same issues with Safari, in that it has crashed about every other day for him since installing the Bur Sur update.
Microsoft’s One Outlook/Monarch Initiative
Randy L. shared an article ( https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft ... e-outlook/ ) discussing Microsoft’s plans to discontinue the standalone Mail and Calendar apps in both Windows 8.x and Windows 10, and later the Windows and Mac desktop versions of Outlook, in favor of a single version of Outlook, which they are referring to as “One Outlook” or “Monarch”. He wondered if the earlier discussed Microsoft plans to replace EWS support in Outlook for the Mac with Microsoft Sync (refer to the August 11, 2020 Zeta Alliance call summary: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68589#p298678
) is just another part of the One Outlook initiative. Since Zimbra supports both ActiveSync and EWS for syncing email, contacts, calendars, and tasks, this could have an impact on future sync options for Zimbra users.
Upcoming Zimbra Patches And New Zimbra Connector Release
Mark S. commented that the Zimbra Partner Portal indicates that 8.8.15 Patch 18 and 9.0 Patch 11 are scheduled to come out in late January. John H. said that either the January P18 and P11 releases or the February P19 and P12 releases are anticipated to include a new version of the Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) where an additional feature will be available to minimize the size of an Outlook PST file. Outlook officially supports PST files up to 50 GB in size, but with Windows registry tweaks, it is possible to force Outlook to accept larger PST sizes, however those larger sizes are not officially supported by Microsoft. John explained that the upcoming new version of ZCO builds on a feature that was introduced back in 9.0 Patch 7 ( https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Zimbra_Releases/9.0.0/P7 ) and 8.8.15 Patch 14 ( https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Zimbra_Releases/8.8.15/P14 ) that allowed for setting Windows registry keys to limit the amount of mailbox data that Outlook synchronizes from a Zimbra server in to a PST file. The P7 and P14 releases required rebuilding a new Outlook PST file for the change to take effect. The new upcoming ZCO feature will instead enable a more user-friendly setting by allowing an arbitrary date to be set from the Zimbra tab within Outlook, so that any synchronized data in the PST file stored prior to this date is removed from the current PST file, without needing to first build a new PST file to put the change in to effect. If a mailbox user needs to access older data, such as email messages prior to the cut-off date set in the Zimbra Outlook tab, then the user will need to login to the Zimbra Web Client to access that data.
New Zextras 3.1.6 Release
Mark S. said that he noticed Zextras released version 3.1.6 (https://docs.zextras.com/zextras-suite- ... /home.html) and asked for clarification on the fix identified as issue ID BCK-403 related to S3 bucket commands from the Zimbra command line interface (CLI). Cine said there were a few commands for S3 buckets that have been moved from the Zextras Powerstore component to the Zextras Core, since those same commands are applicable to additional features in Zextras, aside from Powerstore. Mark S. also asked if Zextras version 3.1.6 is anticipated to be included in the upcoming Zimbra 8.8.15 Patch 18 and 9.0 Patch 11 releases tentatively scheduled for late January. John H. said that this Zextras version does tentatively appear to be included in the upcoming Zimbra 8.8.15 P18 and 9.0 P11 releases.
Randy Leiker
Skyway Networks, LLC