Re: Zimbra calendaring and the President's office

[Tim Ross <tross@calpoly.edu>]

Hi Frances,

At Cal Poly, we migrated to Zimbra email last September and will be migrating to Zimbra calendar (from Oracle 10g calendar) next month.  We were curious what these users are seeing as the biggest issues that slow them down.  Does it have to do with creating/managing meetings with large numbers of users?  Managing other users' calendars?  General slowness of the web client to respond?  Migrated data versus new meetings?  Have other groups on campus complained also, or have they adapted more easily to the new calendar system?

We appreciate any info, so we can work towards avoiding any meltdowns here.

Like Stanford, we have seen some issues with the ZCO and are not recommending it to our users.  It will be available for those who just can't do without Outlook calendar, but we are recommending the web as the best solution. 

Tim Ross
Application Administrator
Collaboration Support Group
Cal Poly State Univ., San Luis Obispo


----- Original Message -----
From: "Frances Atkinson" <frances@sfu.ca>
To: "Pam Buffington" <pam.buffington@oit.gatech.edu>
Cc: "zimbra-hied-admins" <zimbra-hied-admins@sfu.ca>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 7:36:45 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: Zimbra calendaring and the President's office

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