Re: [Evolution] webdav contacts and Zimbra



On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 22:26 -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
Hello, all.  We are having a nightmare of a time trying to integrate
Zimbra and any Linux based PIM front end.  Both Evolution and Kontact
(from KDE 3.5 as we are using Debian Lenny) are seriously broken when it
comes to interoperating with Zimbra.

Your problems are not specific to Zimbra (assuming Zimbra itself has a
good WebDAV implementation; I dunno, I haven't paid attention to Zimbra
for a long time).

IMAP and CalDAV are working very well in Evolution but Contacts have
become a showstopper on what could be a very large Evolution deployment
as email without contacts is . . . well . . . useless.
The first issue is that we are able to connect via webdav to Zimbra and
download the series of .vcf files but Evolution does not seem to
recognize them.  No contacts appear and there are no search results.  I
am guessing the problem is that the webdav plugin is expecting mime-type
text/x-vcard but Zimbra returns text/vcard.  Apparently x-vcard has been
deprecated in favor of vcard. 

"WebDAV backend for addressbook is too strict about content-type."
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566330>

Is there any way to get the webdav plugin
to access vcard instead?

No.

The second problem is the impracticality of downloading the entire
contact list every time one wishes to make a query against the contact
list.

This does not happen.  It 'merely' performs a PROPFIND for each search.
Although, that too, seem unnecessary.

"WebDAV Addressbook backend should use ctags"
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617168>

We are looking at thousands of contacts.  

Yep.

I'm guessing we are
stuck with that as it is the nature of WebDAV from what I understand.

No, that is incorrect.  WebDAV, properly implemented, is VERY efficient.

Is there any other way? I'd love to use LDAP but that presents other
issues more on the Zimbra side.

LDAP as an addressbook solution blows gewy chunks.  I tried for years to
make that work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  We've lost weeks on this and
risk putting a potentially multi-thousand node deployment at risk if we
do not solve it.  Thanks - John

As far as write support goes fixing Bug#566354 would also be important
[comply with GroupDAV spec].
"The WebDAV backend should handle Location header after a response to
PUT method"
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566354>
-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org> LPIC-1, Novell CLA
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba




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