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Messaging & Collaboration Appliance
It provides Web mail, POP and IMAP, calendar, tasks, instant messaging, and documents. You can access it from your mobile devices too!
Shekhar Govindarajan
Saturday, March 01, 2008
This appliance bundles a messaging and collaboration server called Zimbra.
We have already covered Zimbra extensively in the past issues of PCQuest. Refer
to the articles 'Web Mail with Zimbra' (http://pcquest.ciol.com
/content/enterprise/2005/105121804.asp) and 'Messaging & Calendaring' (http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/linux/2007/107031011.asp).
For this article, we assume that you will be using this appliance as your
primary mail server, for which you must ensure that the DNS (Domain Name
Service) A and MX records are set up properly and pointing to the IP address
assigned to this appliance. Start the appliance as explained in the article
'Installation & Implementation.' Login as root. By default the Zimbra server is
set up for a hostname called mail.pcquest.net and for the domain pcquest.net.
You would obviously like to change this to suite to your organization. This can
be done as follows.
Configuring the appliance
First, we will change the hostname of the appliance and the Zimbra server.
Let us assume that you want to set up the hostname, of the appliance and the
server, as mail.company.com. Open the file named hosts, found in the directory
/etc, in a text editor and add mail.company.com to the first line so that it
looks as follows:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
mail.pcquest.com mail.company.com
Save the file. Next issue: su zimbra
Change to the directory /opt/zimbra/ libexec and issue: ./zmsetservername
mail.
company.com.
Finally open the file named 'network' found in /etc/sysconfig and substitute
mail.pcquest.net with mail.company.com for 'HOSTNAME.' Reboot the appliance.
Once the appliance boots up, login to the Zimbra's Administration Console by
typing in https://:7071. Substitute with the IP address
of the appliance. Login with 'admin' as the username and 'pass@word' as the
password. Click on Domains (on the left pane) and on New (right pane). Type
company.com for the 'Domain name' and click on finish. Next, click on 'Global
Settings.' Under the General tab, select company.com for 'Default domain.' Click
on Save, then on Accounts. Here you see some email accounts with pcquest.net as
domain. You will need to change each of these. Click on each, select 'Edit' from
the top. For the 'Account name,' select company.com from the dropdown. Repeat
this step for the other accounts. Finally, you can choose to delete pcquest.net
domain by clicking on Domains> pcquest.net>Delete.
Get, set, and go
To create email accounts for users, click on Accounts and then on New (right
pane). Enter 'shekhar' (say) for the Account name. Type the first and last name
of the user. Type in the password (say, secret123) and confirm. Click on Finish.
Henceforth, users will be able to login to the Zimbra's Web mail by http://.
Users will be able to login using their account name and password. The Web mail
interface is intuitive enough for users to be able to compose, send, and receive
mails. Besides basic mailing, calendaring features of Zimbra have been explained
in the article 'Messaging & Calendaring.'
Authenticate with the Directory Server
This is quite easy-follow a Web-based wizard and you are done. We assume
that you have set up and are running the Directory Server appliance as explained
in the article on page . Login to
the administration console. Click on Domains>company.com (on the left pane).
Click on 'Configure Authentication' (on the top right). For 'Authentication
Mechanism,' select 'External LDAP' from the dropdown. Click on Next. For 'LDAP
URL,' type the IP address of the Directory Server appliance. For 'LDAP filter,'
type in uid=%u. For 'LDAP search base,' type in dc=pcquest,dc=net. Click on
Next. Leave the 'Use DN/Password to bind to external server' unchecked. Click on
Next. To test the settings, type a user ID and password from the LDAP directory.
For example, as per the article on the directory server appliance, shekhar as
the username and pass@word as the password, should work.
Click on test. On successful authentication, click on finish. Now users will
be able to login to the Web mail, using the user ID and corresponding password,
in the Directory Server. Note that login to the Zimbra's administration console
is not authenticated against the directory server. The directory server
authentication applies only for the Web mail/email users.
For more on Zimbra refer to: www.zimbra.com.
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| Though in beta, with the instant
messaging feature in Zimbra, you can chat with your company contacts in real
time, as they login to their Web mail |
You can maintain a calendar for
appointments or meetings online. As well as export it into an iCal format to
use in your desktop calendaring application like Sunbird |
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| Add as many search criteria
(from, to, name, domain, attachment, etc) you want to hit the content you
are looking for. You can even save your search criteria |
As a standard, each user can set
up his/her preferences for email, calendar, filters, etc. Besides, a user
can even set up to POP mails from other email accounts to their Zimbra inbox |
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