Messaging & Collaboration Appliance

This appliance bundles a messaging and collaboration server called Zimbra.

We have already covered Zimbra extensively in the past issues of PCQuest. Refer

to the articles 'Web Mail with Zimbra' (http://pcquest.ciol.com

/content/enterprise/2005/105121804.asp) and 'Messaging & Calendaring' (http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/linux/2007/107031011.asp).

For this article, we assume that you will be using this appliance as your

primary mail server, for which you must ensure that the DNS (Domain Name

Service) A and MX records are set up properly and pointing to the IP address

assigned to this appliance. Start the appliance as explained in the article

'Installation & Implementation.' Login as root. By default the Zimbra server is

set up for a hostname called mail.pcquest.net and for the domain pcquest.net.

You would obviously like to change this to suite to your organization. This can

be done as follows.

Configuring the appliance



First, we will change the hostname of the appliance and the Zimbra server.

Let us assume that you want to set up the hostname, of the appliance and the

server, as mail.company.com. Open the file named hosts, found in the directory

/etc, in a text editor and add mail.company.com to the first line so that it

looks as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

mail.pcquest.com mail.company.com



Save the file. Next issue: su zimbra


Change to the directory /opt/zimbra/ libexec and issue: ./zmsetservername
mail.



company.com.

Finally open the file named 'network' found in /etc/sysconfig and substitute

mail.pcquest.net with mail.company.com for 'HOSTNAME.' Reboot the appliance.

Once the appliance boots up, login to the Zimbra's Administration Console by

typing in https://:7071. Substitute with the IP address

of the appliance. Login with 'admin' as the username and 'pass@word' as the

password. Click on Domains (on the left pane) and on New (right pane). Type

company.com for the 'Domain name' and click on finish. Next, click on 'Global

Settings.' Under the General tab, select company.com for 'Default domain.' Click

on Save, then on Accounts. Here you see some email accounts with pcquest.net as

domain. You will need to change each of these. Click on each, select 'Edit' from

the top. For the 'Account name,' select company.com from the dropdown. Repeat

this step for the other accounts. Finally, you can choose to delete pcquest.net

domain by clicking on Domains> pcquest.net>Delete.

Get, set, and go



To create email accounts for users, click on Accounts and then on New (right

pane). Enter 'shekhar' (say) for the Account name. Type the first and last name

of the user. Type in the password (say, secret123) and confirm. Click on Finish.

Henceforth, users will be able to login to the Zimbra's Web mail by http://.

Users will be able to login using their account name and password. The Web mail

interface is intuitive enough for users to be able to compose, send, and receive

mails. Besides basic mailing, calendaring features of Zimbra have been explained

in the article 'Messaging & Calendaring.'

Authenticate with the Directory Server



This is quite easy-follow a Web-based wizard and you are done. We assume

that you have set up and are running the Directory Server appliance as explained

in the article on page . Login to

the administration console. Click on Domains>company.com (on the left pane).

Click on 'Configure Authentication' (on the top right). For 'Authentication

Mechanism,' select 'External LDAP' from the dropdown. Click on Next. For 'LDAP

URL,' type the IP address of the Directory Server appliance. For 'LDAP filter,'

type in uid=%u. For 'LDAP search base,' type in dc=pcquest,dc=net. Click on

Next. Leave the 'Use DN/Password to bind to external server' unchecked. Click on

Next. To test the settings, type a user ID and password from the LDAP directory.

For example, as per the article on the directory server appliance, shekhar as

the username and pass@word as the password, should work.

Click on test. On successful authentication, click on finish. Now users will

be able to login to the Web mail, using the user ID and corresponding password,

in the Directory Server. Note that login to the Zimbra's administration console

is not authenticated against the directory server. The directory server

authentication applies only for the Web mail/email users.

For more on Zimbra refer to: www.zimbra.com.

Though in beta, with the instant messaging feature in Zimbra, you can chat with your company contacts in real time, as they login to their Web mail	You can maintain a calendar for appointments or meetings online. As well as export it into an iCal format to use in your desktop calendaring application like Sunbird
Add as many search criteria (from, to, name, domain, attachment, etc) you want to hit the content you are looking for. You can even save your search criteria	As a standard, each user can set up his/her preferences for email, calendar, filters, etc. Besides, a user can even set up to POP mails from other email accounts to their Zimbra inbox