A little over a year ago, Ryan kicked off an open forum on responding to your institution’s technological choices. That post led to a really fruitful discussion. Some will reasonably conclude that, for them, it’s best to stick with the choices their institutions have made, even if those aren’t the choices they’d have preferred.
Others, however, will try giving the tools at their institution a try, but find they don’t work very well for them; still others will find themselves too heavily invested in the tools they already use to make a switch.
In such cases, it may be possible to use one’s preferred tools while still integrating, at least to some degree, with the tools most of one’s colleagues are using. It’s certainly possible to set up Google’s tools to work reasonably well with Zimbra’s. Doing so with GMail is fairly simple, for almost any email system.
It’s also relatively straightforward to get Google Calendar working with Zimbra, though a couple of caveats are in order. There is, unfortunately, no bidirectional sync between Zimbra and Google Calendar. That means that, if you want to invite someone using Zimbra to a meeting, you’ll have to do so from within your own Zimbra calendar. For those who issue a lot of meeting invitations, it may well be simpler to stick with Zimbra.
Second, I needed to use a desktop calendar program to get this setup to work. Those who’d rather not use a desktop client may find it easier to just use Zimbra.
That said, if you need to share your calendar because colleagues occasionally invite you to meetings, but you seldom issue meeting invitations yourself, the following may work well for you (since I set this up using a Mac, I used iCal, but it should work with any desktop client that will sync with Google Calendar, no matter the platform):
Once you have your Google Calendar synced with a desktop application, go to your Zimbra calendar, and click the “add calendar” icon:
In the dialog box that pops up, check “Synchronize appointments from remote calendar,”
and enter the URL of your Google Calendar (found under the calendar’s settings, which can be accessed from the calendar list in Google Calendar’s sidebar) in the next dialog that comes up.
That will get your Google Calendar into Zimbra, and it will show your free and busy times to anyone with whom you’ve shared your Zimbra calendar.
When a colleague invites you to a meeting, you’ll be notified in whatever way your desktop application uses. In iCal, it looks like this:
Clicking on the notification icon brings up a dialog box, where you can choose to accept or decline the meeting:
(Note: I neglected to change iCal’s default calendar to my Google Calendar before getting this screenshot; be sure to do that, or to choose the correct calendar in the dialog box.)
Accepting the invitation will add the meeting to your desktop client and send a confirmation message to the person who invited you. Once your desktop client syncs with Google Calendar, the event will also appear in your Zimbra calendar, so other colleagues will know you’re no longer free to meet at that time.
Yes, this setup is a bit of a hassle, and probably isn’t worth it for those who (a) seldom need to use a common calendaring system or (b) use a common calendaring system a lot, but are typically the ones setting up the meeting. But for those who need a common system just frequently enough that their choice to use a different set of tools than most of their colleagues poses a problem, something like this may be a workable solution.
What about you? Have you found your preference for tools other than those your institution uses poses at least occasional difficulties? If so, have you reconsidered the tools you use? Have you found usable workarounds? Let us know in the comments!
[The lead image is a Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by donotlick. All other images are by the author.]