Support for Zimbra’s soapURL

Benefits of this feature include:

• better security - if the user provided an http login url and the server supports both http and https, Zindus switches to https after login
• reduced server load at sites with accounts partitioned across mutliple servers.

The downside of this feature is that users of misconfigured servers might notice delays, see: http://www.zindus.com/faq-extension/#toc-soapurl-problems

Switch to XMLHttpRequest for SOAP

This testing release uses XMLHttpRequest to talk SOAP to the server. Prior releases used the Mozilla SOAP library that was introduced in Mozilla in 2002 but which is being dropped from Thunderbird 3 and Firefox 3.

This change improves performance by around 10%, simplifies the codebase and positions Zindus to port to Thunderbird 3.

A note to extension developers who face switching away from Mozilla SOAP. If you are working with document-style web services (like Zimbra’s), you are doing most of the marshalling and parsing work anyway, so the switch to XMLHttpRequest is straightforward.

If your extension consumes RPC-style services or WSDL, you’ll probably begin by groaning at absence of native or third party library support for SOAP in Mozilla. Without that support, the job looks more like connecting with a document-style SOAP service, namely:

• work out what XML documents your server expects and sends,
• build the XML (DOM or XMLHttpRequest),
• transport it (XMLHttpRequest),
• parse the response (XPath).

That’s more work than you’d expect for an RPC-style client, but the tools are extensively documented and well maintained so you might find it easier than you thought!

This is a bugfix release, see the release notes for details.

The first sync after an upgrade to this version is a slow sync.

The new features in this release are:

• the GAL can be enabled/disabled via a preference
• the “Emailed Contacts” addressbook is localized

The preference to enable/disable the GAL defaults to:

“Yes, when the GAL contains fewer than 500 contacts”.

This default gives the GAL to users in small to medium sized domains. Enterprises and Educational institutions generally prefer to deliver the GAL via LDAP.

Translations for Zimbra’s “Emailed Contacts” addressbook are supported for the following locales: da, de, es, fr, it, ja, ko, pl, pt, ru, sv, zh_CN, zh_HK.

The translation matches the Thunderbird version. In French Thunderbird for example, the addressbook appears as “zindus/Personnes contactées par mail”.

The first sync after an upgrade to this version is a slow sync.

See the release notes for details of bug fixes.

This release introduces support for Zimbra 5.x.

Zindus now works with:
- all Zimbra Versions: 3.x, 4.x and 5.x and
- all Zimbra Editions: Open Source, Network Edition etc

This release also includes a collection of minor bug fixes, see the release notes for details.

The current testing release has support for Zimbra 5.0:

http://www.zindus.com/download/addon?p=tb&rt=testing

The testing release is the release candidate for the next production release - due any day now.

This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details.

The first sync after an upgrade to this version is a slow sync - all contacts are retrieved from the server.

Verbose logging is now turned on by default. This will help fix bugs faster.

The tradeoff is that sync is slower, but the overall user experience isn’t affected much. People who really care about speed can turn off verbose logging - see Tools/Zindus/preferences.

Minor bugfix release, see the release notes.

Zindus synchronizes your Thunderbird addressbook with a Zimbra server.

This is free (open-source) software and runs on all Thunderbird platforms including Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

The current release is beta, and your feedback is welcome. Any bugs you run into will probably just result in a failure to sync. ie. you are unlikely to lose any data, but it is possible, so backup your addressbook - you’ve been warned!

Report bugs to us after reading the faq.