Hello, all. We have a potentially huge Debian Lenny deployment and one of the last showstoppers is email to replace Exchange/Outlook/Windows. Zimbra is working well on the backend but not the frontend - great web interface but still lacking some essential features. Evolution does not support Zimbra Address Books. Since we are primarily pushing KDE, Kontact seems the obvious choice but it is hopelessly broken.

We have managed to work around just about every obstacle but one. Appointments made in Zimbra (either via web interface or synchronization with mobile devices) are synchronized with Korganizer as if they were UTC rather than the original time zone. All the appointments are shifted by the offset from UTC.

This appears to be a well known bug. The proposed solution is to move to KDE4 but that is not an option for us. We must make this work in KDE 3.5.x. Is there ANYTHING we can do to get this working properly? Thanks - John

Are you using KDE PIM from the Enterprise3 branch? I believe that this is still supported commercially by KDAB as their customers use it, and thus may contain a fix for this.

That would be great. Pardon my ignorance but I am unfamiliar with Enterprise3. Where do I find it? I'm madly googling now but a quick point in the right direction would be most appreciated. Thanks very much - John

I've downloaded the source from
deb-src http://files.kolab.org/apt/releases lenny unstable
and will try a debuild on them. I hope that's what I'm supposed to do - John

Well . . . since we are a 64 bit system, I downloaded the source deb, rebuilt, and installed. I think I am running the version you recommend (KOrganizer Version 3.5.9 (enterprise35 20100401.1112527)). To my shock, dismay, and disappointment, it displays the same behavior. I just created an appointment for 9:00 PM EDT in Zimbra and 9:30 PM EDT in my Blackberry and they show up as 5:00 PM and 5:30 PM in KOrganizer

Am I out of options here in KDE 3.5.x? That would be a great shame. Thanks - John

Alas, the frustration continues. As much as we are concerned about making the switch to KDE 4 in a production environment, with no option to make this work in 3.5, we investigated using lenny-backports. That is still 3.5. We then considered testing (squeeze) or even unstable (sid). They are all still 4.3. We tried 4.3 early on and it lacked critical functionality for us.

All we read says that 4.4 ends that pain and is a true and great replacement for 3.5. We were all ready to give it a try until we found it is only in experimental repositories and nowhere near release in the Debian world. I can't imagine putting it into production for thousands of users right now.

Are we truly at the end of the road and needing to say, "we can't with Kontact?" This isn't trivial. This is a crippling, rendering useless bug. Any guidance would be appreciated before we are forced to jump ship. If we don't resolve it tomorrow, we don't resolve it. Thanks - John

I would recommend asking the developers of Kontact, and the other components of the KDE PIM suite in #kontact on Freenode.

Double Argh!! As an ardent open source advocate who has devoted years to promoting open source usage and is in the midst of launching a new start up dedicated to providing Linux on the desktop to micro-businesses on an international scale, this escapade has been most disheartening. I can only recall one other scenario in the open source world where I had to say, "We can't do that."

We bailed on Kontact because of this showstopper bug and decided to try the new Evolution WebDAV contact support. Great, except it, too, is broken. It malforms the DNS query by prepending the domain (i.e., looking up mycompany.com@zimbra.mycompany.com instead of just zimbra@mycompany.com). We worked around it by creating actual host entries for mycompany.com@zimbra.mycompany.com only to find that Zimbra did not support the vcf mime type!

So, we have no options. The bug is supposedly fixed in 4.4 and no effort is being made to fix it in 3.5.x. We have limited resources as a minimally funded start up but we could put up a small bounty for fixing this. Is anyone interested? We would also need to address the problem that Zimbra IMAP contacts are read only. We would probably need a rudimentary WebDAV implementation for contacts. Thanks - John

It's a miracle! or maybe just an accident. Kontact appears to be handling time zones correctly. I am guessing that our installation of Evolution from the Debian testing repository (we are running stable) pulled in an newer libical which is handling time zones properly. Is that possible?

We have a remaining cosmetic error. Appointments appear to be added to Zimbra correctly but they always give us an "Error while saving calendar" message. This appears after what looks like a Konqueror file transfer dialog. Any idea what is causing this and how we fix it? Thanks - John

Hmm . . . another glitch - it looks like we cannot delete appointments on Zimbra from Kontact.

We have gotten rid of the cosmetic error by changing the upload and download to webdav:// rather than http://. However, we still cannot delete appointments.

The strangeness continues. Not only can we create appointments from Kontact but we can edit them. The only thing we cannot do is delete! When we do a packet trace, we see a clear denial:

BEGIN:VEVENT

DTSTAMP:20100424T062944Z

ORGANIZER;CN=John A. Sullivan III:MAILTO:deleted
X-ALT-DESC:<html><body></body></html>

X-MICROSOFT-CDO-INTENDEDSTATUS:BUSY

X-MICROSOFT-DISALLOW-COUNTER:TRUE

CREATED:20100424T062921Z

UID:578e3418-9227-4836-b5ef-dd99849d54c2

LAST-MODIFIED:20100424T062921Z

SUMMARY:LDAP project plan

STATUS:CONFIRMED

DTSTART:20100327T151500Z

DTEND:20100327T154500Z

TRANSP:OPAQUE

HTTP/1.1 401 permission denied: you do not have sufficient permissions

Server: nginx

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:29:44 GMT

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Connection: keep-alive

WWW-Authenticate: BASIC realm="Zimbra"

Any ideas about why we can do everything but delete?

The packet trace appears to indicate that we are transferring the entire calendar file when we make changes. Is that how WebDAV works? That seems awfully excessive. Thanks - John

Ah, the inconsistency is maddening! After logging out of our KDE session and logging back in, the spurious errors on creation have return. We do not get them when we edit (which works). We do not get them when we delete (which does not work! So, the grid is:

Create Works Get error message
Edit Works No error message
Delete Fails No error message

WebDav will transfer the whole calendar each time, yes. CalDav fixes this, but CalDav isn't available for KDE 3. Why this occurs I don't know, but this is probably because Zimbra supports CalDav not WebDav.

We have posted a bounty and the Trinity Desktop Project (http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/) is interested in fixing this in 3.5.x. If anyone is interested in contributing the bounty, please contact me. Thanks - John