Re: [Evolution] webdav contacts and Zimbra

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam opengroupware us>]

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