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://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUU ... Ww2fY/edit
- Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome.
Proposed Nextcloud Integration for Zimbra 9 and Zimbra X
Barry demonstrated a prototype Zimlet that integrates access to Nextcloud within Zimbra 9 and Zimbra X via an HTML iframe. This avoids the time consuming effort of needing to write a Zimlet that integrates each feature individually from the Nextcloud API. He has suggested this Zimlet for inclusion in 9 and X to the Zimbra product/development team. Barry said that for each Zimlet that he writes, he is currently putting more focus on scalability, before features. Mark S. asked if Barry’s Nextcloud prototype could work in the instance where a customer has an on-premise Nextcloud installation, but they are using a cloud-hosted instance of Zimbra. Barry said that this should be possible and discussed a few of the configuration options needed in the Nextcloud configuration file to make this possible.
Zimlet Road Map
Mark S. said that one of the challenges he currently faces with his customers is clarity on which features Synacor plans to support in the future within Zimbra, so that features that will soon be deprecated are not promoted. John E. said he is pushing internally within Synacor to get a Zimlet road map published so that Synacor can communicate the Zimlet priorities that have been identified so far from Zimbra customers. He also said there is a parallel effort being made to get the product documentation updated too for the upcoming launch of Zimbra 9. John said that 16 of the 36 Zimlets are now finalized and have internally published timelines of which quarter this year they will become generally available for Zimbra 9 and X.
Suggestions for Zimbra Patch Release Notes
John E. shared a follow-up from last week’s call regarding feedback from Mark S. about an alternative way to format each patch’s release notes document so that it is easier to determine which Zimbra services need to be restarted, following the installation of a patch. John said that there is an internal discussion taking place at Synacor about a more user friendly way of presenting this information. Randy L. said that another issue with the current release notes format is that changes required in earlier patch versions are repeatedly included in all subsequent patch release notes documents, making it difficult to determine what changes a given patch actually requires. For example, even though Zimbra Chat & Zimbra Talk were replaced with Zimbra Connect in an earlier version of Zimbra some time ago, this change is repeatedly included in all release notes documents since that time. Randy suggested changing the format of the release notes document so that text headers are used to more effectively group this information together, for example: “If upgrading from Zimbra 8.8.12 P1”. Each group could then provide upgrade notes specific to coming from a given earlier Zimbra version to the current patch version. Mark S. said that another point of confusion is that Synacor assumes Zimbra admins with multi-node Zimbra installations will know which Zimbra nodes (LDAP, MTA, Proxy, Mailbox Stores) need to be updated for a patch. For example, a Zimbra admin who applies a patch to an LDAP node, when the patch is designed to fix an issue with a Network Module NG component will see an error message when installing the patch, since Network Module NG is not normally installed on an LDAP node. This can mislead the Zimbra admin in to wondering if the patch failed to install properly.
New Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) Version Coming Soon
John H. said a new ZCO version is expected to be released in the next few weeks that will fix at least 3 different causes of crashes that currently affect Outlook. He also said that bugs present in Windows 10 and Office 365 related to searches in Outlook are known to currently cause crashes and that Zimbra has a support case open with Microsoft to determine the root cause.
Possible Bug with Recurring Calendar Events
Randy L. reported on an issue discovered by one of his customers where recurring calendar invites sent from the Office 365 version of Outlook for Mac using Exchange Web Services (EWS) do not consistently appear on the expected day and time for the invitees of the calendar event. This issue does not appear to affect calendar invitees for one-time events. Calendar invitees have reported that the recurring events appear a number of hours earlier or later than when the event organizer scheduled the event. This issue also appears to affect Zimbra Web Client users, who accept a recurring calendar invite from an organizer using Outlook for Mac. All of the calendar invitees were in the same time zone, and time zone settings on both the organizer’s and invitees’ computers were confirmed correct. John E. and John H. shared some details of the iCalendar invite message that can be examined to try and identify the root cause. John E. also reported that Synacor is currently in the process of performing testing of calendar apps for cross-client compatibility. John said that Zimbra currently supports these interfaces for processing calendar invites: SOAP API, CalDAV, Internet Free/Busy, ActiveSync, and Exchange Web Services. So far, Synacor’s testing has shown that compatibility issues have appeared mainly within CalDAV clients (example: Apple Calendar), and that compatibility seems to vary between versions of each calendar app.
Forcing Zimbra LDAP to Use TLS
Barry asked if anyone knew how to force TLS connections to and from Zimbra LDAP. Mark S. provided some Zimbra local configuration value settings. This Wiki article discusses these settings: https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/TLS/STARTT ... fig_Values