Sharing items in Zimbra Collaboration Suite

If your company uses Zimbra Collaboration Suite to manage your email, calendars, and contacts, you can share any folder in your account with any other user on the system, and external users as well.

In Zimbra, everything is stored in folders, so this means you can share email folders, calendars, address books, and briefcase folders. The briefcase is a feature used to store files you need access to on a regular basis, from anywhere you can log into Zimbra's web client. I find it useful to store tutorials for solutions to users' common computer problems, or for storing screenshots or photos of a broken laptop when I need to send it in for repair.

To share a folder in Zimbra,

1) Right click on the folder you want to share (whether in your mail, address book, calendar, etc), and select "Share Folder."

2) Choose whether you want to set the sharing to internal users, external guests, or anyone who happens upon the web address to the folder. You can only share email folders with internal users. If you choose Internal users, you'll be asked to fill in the email addresses of the people to whom you want to share the folder. If you choose external guests, you'll be asked to fill in a username and password for them. If you choose "anyone" you can skip to the last step.

3) There are 4 roles to choose from; "None," "Viewer," "Manager," and "Admin." I have not really found a use for "None" but someone put it there for a reason. Viewer is view-only. Manager means they can edit the contents of the folder as well. Admin means they can also invite and manage the sharing for the folder with other people.

4) Next, you choose how you want to notify the internal users with whom you're sharing the folder. If you "Send a standard email" it'll give other Zimbra users on the same system a simple way to accept and add the folder to their list of that particular type of folder (email, calendar etc). You can also choose to not send an email in case you want to only give people the option to subscribe to a folder at their leisure.

5) Finally, if you've shared a calendar, address book, or briefcase externally either to a particular guest, or to the public in general, there may be a couple URLs at the bottom. If you're sharing an address book you'll get a URL to a CSV file. If you're sharing a calendar, you'll get both a link to an .ics file, and to a web page which displays the calendar. If you're sharing a briefcase, you'll get the address to a web page which displays an index of the content of the particular briefcase.