How To Link Remote iCal Calendar

How To Link A Remote iCal (ics) Calendar Into Your Zimbra Calendar

• This will show you how to link a remote ICS calendar into your Zimbra calendar
• If you are linking your Zimbra calendar to a remote Zimbra calendar where the users share the same LDAP server, you can simply share to their email address, and it should work.
• For all other remote calendars, you must link the calendar using iCal (ics) format.
• As of this writing, remote calendars that require a user/password are not supported, but this feature has been added in ZCS 4.5 which has not been released yet (http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12238)

Steps

• Construct a valid source URL for your remote calendar. Some example URL's:

http://www.blah.com/phpical/calendars/default.ics (No authenticatin required - PHP iCal server)
http://zimbra.domain.com/service/home/USER1/calendar?fmt=ics (No authentication required - Unrelated Zimbra server) 
http://user2@otherdomain.com:password@zimbra.domain.com/service/home/USER1/calendar?fmt=ics (Authentication Required - Unrelated Zimbra Server - ZCS 4.5  Only)
Note: The '?fmt=ics' is required for zimbra iCal shares until bug 12373 is fixed (http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12373)
Note: The '@' is a URL-encoded representation of the '@' symbol which is necessary so the server doesn't get confused with the other '@' in the URL

• In your target Zimbra calendar, right click 'calendars' and select 'New Calendar'
• Enter a Name for you new calendar
• Click the checkbox 'Synchronize appointments from remote calendar' (a new field appears for the URL)
• Now paste in the URL into the box and Click OK.

Problems? If you got any errors (URL unreachable, etc), then there is a problem with the URL or it may require authentication.

• Note: You can right-click the reload the calendar from the remote at any time. I'm not sure how long Zimbra will cache the calendar before reload.