Messaging and Calendaring

Zimbra bundled with the PCQLinux appliance provides a responsive AJAX based web mail interface which rivals even desktop E-mail clients. And there is more to it

Saturday, March 10, 2007

With PCQLinux 2007 Collaboration you get an up and running installation of Zimbra -a cool messaging and calendaring solution. Zimbra starts with the appliance startup and adapting it to your domain and network. With a little configuration, it will provide a full-fledged messaging and collaboration solution, running on your network.

In this article we will quickly go through setting up e-mailing and calendaring functions in Zimbra. We assume that your Internet E-mail server is residing on an Internet server and PCQLinux collaboration appliance, sitting on your network, will relay and fetch mails from your Internet mail server. Boot up the appliance and setup its networking as explained in the Virtualization section.

Configuring e-mail
Once the appliance has booted, access the Zimbra's admin interface by keying in the URL https://192.168.3.16:7071/zimbra Admin in the Web browser (IE or Firefox). Substitute 192.168.3.16 with the IP address you assigned to the appliance. The username and password to login to the admin interface are admin and pass@word respectively. Once logged in, click on Domains and then click on New (on the top left corner of the right pane). For the domain name, type in your e-mail domain, for example, it4enterprise.com. Keep clicking on the Next button, accepting the defaults and finally click on the Finish button.

You can search through your e-mails, contacts and calendars using a plethora of conditions

Next, click on Global Settings and then click on the MTA tab. For 'Relay MTA for external delivery' type in the name of your Internet mail server, for example, mail. it4enterprise.com. Click on Save (at the top left corner). Next click on Accounts. Click on New and follow the wizard to create e-mail accounts for users. Make sure you select your e-mail domain from the dropdown as opposed to localhost.localdomain-which is selected by default. Setting up Zimbra for basic e-mailing has been explained in detail in the article 'Web Mail with Zimbra.' You can read this article online at http://tinyurl.com/32w88j.

One of the features in the latest version of Zimbra bundled with the appliance is that instead of setting up fetchmail, as explained in the earlier article, users can configure to POP e-mails from other mail servers which can include your Internet mail server. That is, after setting up e-mail accounts, you can ask users to setup POP E-mails from the Internet mail server. It's easy and can be achieved as follows. Users can login to their Web mail client using the URL https://192.168.3.16 with their e-mail as the username and the password which was specified during the creation of the e-mail account.
A user can then click on Options>POP Accounts>Add. The settings required here can be copied from your existing e-mail client (like Outlook). Once done, clicking on the Get Mail button on the top will POP the e-mails from the Internet mail server.

When e-mails carry the date for meetings, and calendars store the meetings, shouldn't both get integrated ?

Shared Calendar: A simple use case
Suppose there are two people- Shekhar Govindarajan and Sanjay Majumder involved in a project named ABC. The end customer is Binesh Kutty whose e-mail address is bixx@gmail.com. Shekhar co-ordinates all meetings with the end customer while Sanjay is the person responsible for executing the project. Sanjay's e-mail account has already been created in Zimbra by the administrator. Next, Shekhar needs to schedule a meeting for project discussion using Zimbra's Calendar. Shekhar logs in to the Web mail client and first adds Binesh as his contact. To add a contact, one can click on New>Contact and fill in the name and e-mail (Binesh and bixx@gmail.com in this case).

Next Shekhar will create a new shared calendar (amongst Shekhar, Sanjay and Binesh) called Project ABC. For this, while you are still logged into the Web mail client, one can click on the Calendar tab and the click on New>Calendar. When prompted the name of the calendar (Project ABC in our case) should be entered.

This will show the calendar on the left pane. To share the calendar, right click on the calendar and click on Share Calendar. Select 'Internal Users or Groups' and type in the e-mail address of the internal users with whom you want to share the calendar with-in our case, sanjay@it4enterprise.com. Click on OK. Again click on Share Calendar and this time select 'External Guests.' Type in the e-mail (bixx@gmail.com in our case) and a password for external people (say customers) to view the calendar.

Note that one can subscribe to the calendar using a URL like https://192.168.3.16/ home/shekhar@it4enterprise.com/Project%20ABC (which is in the format http:///home//).

A one stop AJAX based interface to configure all aspects of your Messaging server. No more looking at log files and mail queues from command

This URL fetches the ICS (iCalendar) file for the Project ABC calendar which can in turn be fed to a calendar application like Mozilla Sunbird. The next obvious step is to add appointments and meetings to the calendar. But wait, Zimbra shines out here by providing an easy and logical way of adding appointments.

Integrated E-mail and Calendar
More often than not, one arrives at a meeting schedule over E-mails. Subsequently one goes into the Calendar and schedules a meeting. Zimbra facilitates this process through a single click. Look at the screenshot where Binesh has sent a mail to Shekhar confirming a meeting tomorrow. Note that the word tomorrow is a hyperlink.

Right clicking on the word 'tomorrow' and selecting 'New Appointment' will bring up a small window which will allow us to add an appointment directly to the calendar. Note that from the Calendar dropdown you can select the Project ABC calendar. And voila, an appointment gets added to the Project ABC calendar and all participants (as setup in the above section) get notified over e-mail. Zimbra surely has much more to offer. Check out the flash demo at www.zimbra.com/demos/zimbra_overview.html.

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