Hi folks,
We have a very obscure issue that centres around inconsistency in the Organizer string of a meeting, and we think Outlook (or the Connector) is partially to blame. I'll go into the details momentarily in the hopes that someone from Zimbra on this list can forward the question to a deep calendar engineer, because going through Support for issues like this is generally hopeless. But first a more general question: This is just one of many issues that we can generally nail down to Outlook causing, and we're wondering what other campuses' views are on Outlook and Zimbra? Fully support? Support but discourage? Don't support but allow, or banned for life? We're in the "don't support but allow" camp right now.
Anyway, this specific issue:
- User1 creates a meeting and invites User2. User2 is on Outlook and also has User1's calendar shared to them as a viewer
- User1 has their address set to "first_last@sfu.ca" and that's what's in the Organizer string in the ICS for the meeting
- User1 makes a change to the meeting - all goes well
- User2 uses Outlook to modify the meeting on his end - he can't remember exactly what he does, maybe tags it or uses the "Suggest alternate time" feature
- User1 makes another change to the meeting. This time Zimbra rejects the change for User2, claiming that the Organizer string doesn't match
The ICS file for User1 is quite different than for User2. They both have the same UID for the event, but User2 has some Outlook-added attributes and a different description. Most importantly, his Organizer string is now different. Whereas User1's organizer string is:
ORGANIZER; CN=First Last:mailto:first_last@sfu.ca
For User2 it is:
ORGANIZER;SENT-BY="mailto:user2@sfu.ca":mailto:user1@sfu.ca
The Exception thrown by Zimbra says as much:
com.zimbra.cs.mailbox.BadOrganizerException: Changing ORGANIZER of an appointment is not allowed: old='user1@sfu.ca' new='first_last@sfu.ca'
So the question is, where's the fault in the code? Should Outlook be allowed to change the organizer from the user's email alias to the user's account? (note, both are valid email addresses in User1's zimbra profile) Or is the code that detects whether an Organizer address is the same failing to pick up on the fact that
User1@sfu.ca ==
first_last@sfu.ca ?
In the 7 months since we upgraded to Zimbra 8(.0.7), I've had one other report of an Organizer mismatch (in the same way - alias vs userid). So this is not a widespread issue and could just be a weird one-off (two-off?) spurious issue, but I'd really like to understand how it's possible
(as an aside, a colleague of mine deleted a calendar event that had been sent to he and I by User2 because he had write access to the calendar the event had been created in. The event had been created using
User1_alias@sfu.ca as the Organizer but the cancel message went out with
User1@sfu.ca as the Organizer. This time the cancel was processed without Exception for me. The only difference from above is that in this case, both Organizer strings started with the same "CN=First Last" part.)
--
Steve Hillman IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca IT Services
778-782-3960 Simon Fraser University