[Update: This turned up on Planet Mozilla, even though it was only published for a few minutes before being withdrawn, so to prevent 404s, I’m putting it back. But the answer appears to be: other people can see my free/busy information, so the person who reported a problem was probably looking in the wrong place. Zimbra actually works well and how you might expect it to.]

[On the principle of “if there’s no reason for it to be private, it should be public”…]

I use Google Calendar, and I’m very happy with it. The UI is excellent, it supports events starting and ending in different timezones for flights, I can open it in a tab in Thunderbird, and I can share it with my wife and see our calendars overlaid. It’s super. The only thing it lacks is offline support.

However, that means I don’t use Zimbra, the MoCo calendar. And so when people want to schedule meetings with me, they assume I am free all the time :-|.

Can anyone, probably a MoCo employee, tell me how to get Zimbra to give other people my correct free/busy information?

I have managed to import my Google Calendar into Zimbra as an external calendar. When I go to its properties, the checkbox “Exclude this calendar when reporting free/busy times” is unchecked. When I try and arrange a meeting, the Scheduler correctly shows when I am free and when I am busy. And yet, other people who try and arrange meetings involving me tell me that I still look to them like I’m free all the time.

Importantly, I want to solve this without having to share the details of what I am doing when with everyone. I only want to share free/busy information. The “Share Calendar” option looks like it’ll share too much.

Help? :-)