My current employer uses Zimbra for email and calendar hosting. I’d been told that there was little that my favorite email client, Thunderbird, could do as far as interacting with Zimbra.
Of course, I got IMAP email working with Zimbra fairly easily. To my delight, though, I got Thunderbird syncing with the Zimbra server’s calendar feature! Here’s how it works:
After installing Thunderbird’s Lightning calendar plugin, click “Calendars” in the bottom of the left pane. Click “New..” to create a new calendar source.
Zimbra uses the iCalendar format, so select that. Then provide the following URL:
http://yourservername/zimbra/home/username/calendar?fmt=ics
…where yourservername and username are your appropriate Zimbra settings (duh).
Voila! Now my appointments appear right in Thunderbird, and I can create appointments in Thunderbird which appear in Zimbra’s calendar! w00t!
I haven’t tried other functionality, such as clicking on an emailed invitation to add an appointment, but this is farther than I expected to get. I’m sure the rest will follow. Next step is to add Google Calendar support, but that has been well-covered elsewhere.
It sure is cool when you can whip your open-source apps into doing exactly what you want.
Two open-source applications that play well together? The horror! 🙂
Maybe someone in your company’s IT department should actually look at a program’s features before telling people what it can’t do….