Re: Zimbra calendaring and the President's office

[Ammy Hill <ammyh@stanford.edu>]

At Stanford, we've delayed our calendar roll-out to get some fixes for issues we found with the calendar in our pilot test. The latest release - 5.0.15 - is supposed to include our remaining critical calendar fixes. We're starting testing this week to ensure that it meets our needs, but assuming the fixes haven't broken anything, we expect the 5.0.15 release to have significantly improved calendar performance. We implemented 5.0.12 a few months ago and we have already noted a significant performance improvement in the calendar.

Our executive assistant staff was also challenged by the transition to Zimbra. We're planning specialized training for executive assistants focusing on those who manage calendars for others, manage resource and location calendars, and plan large events with many attendees. As we're coming from an Oracle Calendar background, our challenges may be different from yours, but I'd be happy to share the issues and workarounds we've found.

We haven't found the Outlook Connector to perform well enough to make it a recommendation over using the web-based version, but this may have to do with our very large Global Address Lookup. Your experience may be different.

Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness Specialist
Stanford University - IT Services

----- "Frances Atkinson" <frances@sfu.ca> wrote:

> Hi Pamela, and others, our President's office went from Eudora/POP for
> email and a Corporate Time client program for calendaring, to ZWC for
> everything. 
> 
> They say the web client is slowing them down to unacceptable levels,
> resulting in a key secretary having to catch up on the weekends. 
> 
> Our desktop support staff are testing the President's very large
> calendar on Outlook as I write. His office does not come from an
> Outlook environment, so this could be interesting. 
> 
> Andy from Zimbra emailed me and suggested we try Zimbra Desktop, also
> upgrade our Zimbra installation to .13 or higher for calendaring
> performance improvements. We're currently on 5.0.11 and are/were
> planning to upgrade to 5.0.14 on April 4 (i.e. on our next monthly
> maintenance window.) I notice that the Zimbra site for Zimbra Desktop
> says don't put it into production yet - the President's office seems
> an adventurous place to do so! ZDC is, however, being used
> successfully by staff supporting an Associate Dean in one of our
> Faculties. Does anyone have any ZDC experience with key executive
> users?
> 
> Frances 
> 
> 
> ----- "Pamela K Buffington" <pam.buffington@oit.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
> | Hi Frances, We are currently in the process of transitioning our
> | Presidents/Provosts office from an environment where they used
> Eudora
> | for email via pop, and Exchange for Contacts and Calendaring  ... ?
> | ... Yeah ok, I don't know why they did that either.
> | 
> | We started off very rocky with lots of Outlook problems that turned
> | out to be Windows problems not ZCO problems. BUT Things seem to be
> | going ok right this second. *Knocks on wood* 
> | 
> | Can you give us more details about your melt-down? Is it Outlook
> | related, or ZWC, or ??? What version are you on these days?
> | 
> | Thanks
> | Pam
> | 
> | ----- Original Message -----
> | From: "Frances Atkinson" <frances@sfu.ca>
> | To: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
> | Sent: Saturday, March 14, 2009 11:15:58 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada
> | Eastern
> | Subject: Zimbra calendaring and the President's office
> | 
> | Hello Zimbra higher ed sites, I would appreciate knowing what your
> key
> | corporate offices' experiences are with Zimbra calendaring, or
> whether
> | they are even using it. (If not, what are they using?) 
> | 
> | Our President's office is currently having a melt-down after a
> month
> | or so of trying to use it!
> | 
> | Thanks in advance for any info.
> | 
> | Frances
> | 
> | -- 
> | Frances Atkinson
> | Director
> | Institutional, Collaborative, and Academic Technologies 
> | IT Services
> | Simon Fraser University
> | www.sfu.ca
> | 778-782-5721
> | frances@sfu.ca