BlackBerry OS 10: Caldav Setup with Zimbra

I have owned my Blackberry Z10, going on a year now, and I have absolutely loved it.  However one of the issues that I have fought was in integrating it with my Zimbra Installation.  Email was easy, the IMAP protocol sorted that out easily enough…  However calendars turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected.

Here is the versions that I validated these steps on.

• Blackberry Z10 with 10.2.1.2977
• Zimbra Collaboration Server 8.5.0

Here is how to get it done.

Figure 1-1 – System Settings

Figure 1-1 gets us started, I am assuming that you know how to find the settings on BB10, but once there go into the Accounts section.

Figure 1-2 – Accounts

Figure 1-2 is a listing of all of the existing accounts, with mine obfuscated of course, however we are going to be adding another one, so we select Add Account.

Figure 1-3 – Add Accounts

You can see above in Figure 1-3, that we don’t use the “Subscribed Calendar” selection, but instead go to Advanced.  When I used Subscribed Calender, it was never able to successfully perform a synchronization.

Figure 1-4 – Advanced Setup

In Figure 1-4 we are selecting CalDAV as the type of Account to use.  Also a little footnote, I was unable to get CardDAV working.  I will provide an update or another article if I find a way around this.

Figure 1-5 – CalDAV Settings

In Figure 1-5 we are populating all of the information needed to make a connection.  Please keep in mind, that we need to use user@domain.tld for the username, and the Server Address should be in the following format:  https://zimbra.domain.tld/dav/user@domain.tld/Calendar.  The important bits here are (1) https – I suspect http works as well, but I did not validate (2) username – the username is a component of the URI, this makes it a little tough to implement for less sophisticated users (3) Calendar – the default calendar for all Zimbra users is named “Calendar” – with a capital “C” not sure if you can have calendars with other names, but this is the name needed for most situations.

Now set your password and sync interval and you should be ready to go.