Designates to Sharing Roles: Reading 'em in and Writing 'em out

So now you're saying: I have this Designate data out of my soon-to-be retired Oracle Calendar Server, what do I do with it now?

We'll tell you that -- but first you've got to wrap your mind around the fundamental conundrum of OCS Delegate to Zimbra sharing roles mapping: that OCS has WAY more options than Zimbra.

This can be potentially infuriating to end users (who have gotten used to the range of capability) and maddening to the folks in charge of migrating (who need to communicate this to those potentially irate and already confused end users).

We've kept it as simple as possible.

If Alice made Bob a Designate with any View rights at all in OCS, in Zimbra Alice would at least have given View sharing privileges to Bob. (This is not too controversial.)



For Modify Privileges it gets a little more intricate, but relies on a simple choice: Do you want to cast a wide net or a narrow one?



Let me expand on this. For all users when converting this data you have this option in OraCalReader:

Since in OCS Alice meant for Bob (say) to have at least some Modify rights, if you want to cast a wide net, select ANY. If you as a company want to strictly allow Modify rights only if full modify rights have already been allowed, select ALL.

So now this all goes into our intermediate database and to produce a list you can execute, go into the database, select Macros, and double-click on M_OutputZimbraProxies (we tend to use the term Proxy for Designate/Delegate/Sharing Role for historical reasons).

This results in an output file called ZMPROXY.BAT, which looks like this:

zmmailbox -z -m claudette@DOMAIN mfg -i /Calendar account adam@DOMAIN rwidx

zmmailbox -z -m claudette@DOMAIN mfg -i /Calendar account bela@DOMAIN r

zmmailbox -z -m location1@DOMAIN mfg -i /Calendar account claudette@DOMAIN rwidx

zmmailbox -z -m bela@DOMAIN mfg -i /Calendar account adam@DOMAIN rwidx

Which says Claudette gives Adam read/write access to her calendar, etc. etc. etc.

Of course you've got to take this to file to Zimbra and run it as your Zimbra admin. You also can edit it before you do so if you need to.

The same capability will work for Meeting Maker Proxy roles today (we read these directly from the raw Meeting Maker data).

If folks are interested in doing this for migrating Designate rights into Exchange we'll look at it -- it's a little more complex and will work only for Exchange 2007 sp1.