Notices

I can confirm that with 2.2009.51-1 firmware and with v5 series Zimbra initial synchronization of email, calendar and contacts will succeed - thou producing error with tasks - as v5 Zimbra does not support syncing tasks through activesync. But after initial synchronization calendar sync doesn't work anymore - because of this task error - and no calendar records are updated (report below suggest that it works even with tasks error but I was not able to verify it - all I know for sure that it does not work on my phone - it only works like that on initial full sync). I opened also bug report for that - https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8191

Question to Vitaly: Is it possible to manually configure MfE to skip tasks sync for now with Zimbra v5?

Besides calendar and task - email and contacts syncing seems to complete without sync errors. I have not yet tested much but it seems that adding a new contact from phone results with contact record containing invalid fields (actually no data on proper fields) in Zimbra after the sync - might be data fields schema translatin error/mismatch or something...

After upgrading Zimbra to 6.0.5 I did try again to sync Zimbra and N900 (as calendar sync was not working with Zimbra v5). N900 MfE seems to be really buggy as it has random quirks - with new and empty Zimbra account I managed to get all sorts of sync results - N900 not syncing calendar, N900 syncing calendar if creating new calendar, N900 deleteing all calendars during sync, N900 not creating new calendar during sync, N900 creating several new calendars (for each sync), N900 reporting sync success but really not syncing.

After fiddling around a bit and testing all sorts of scenarios I came to some conculsions:

1) Do create a new calendar in N900 for Zimbra sync - I never managed to get default N900 calendar to sync. In MfE configuration choose some this newly created calendar to sync - not N900! For first sync this calendar should be absolutely empty!

2) If seeing strange results from sync or sync not working properly - do reboot the N900 to have activesync daemon restarted and try again

I really cant understand why MfE in N900 is still so buggy and problematic - why Nokia did not port existing symbian and mostly working version of MfE to N900 which could have same feature set and stability in theory. Its really disapponting - I own N900 for several months now but because of poor MfE I can't use it on working days. And Im not the only one having this problem...

Small update:

It seems that N900 calendar and task RE-sync will work only one-way - all calendar management needs to be done in Zimbra. When editing calendar or tasks in N900 then calendar resync wont work anymore (sync stalls until activesync daemon timeout) - to fix it full calendar sync needs to be perfomed (sic!).

The biggest change from Zimbra v5 to v6 and N900 sync behaviour seems to be that now full calendar sync seems to work - with Zimbra v5 it did initial full sync but exited with unsuccessful status - now with Zimbra v6 full sync completes ok.

But it seems that calendar two-way sync is pretty much broken - so MfE is still not very usable in real life situation.

I do agree the MfE has a long way to go in many respects. But I have at least gotten it to do two-way calendar sync with our organization's Zimbra 6 server. After I make a calendar change or addition, if I manually resync MfE. This is not just a "send/receive" command but a full manual synchronization of MfE. I would prefer it did this seamlessly and using push without involving Nokia Messaging but at least it does work for me at some level. The Zimbra version we are running is Zimbra 6.0.4_GA_2038.RHEL5_64.