If you were reading the Zimbra blog (it is in the Architel OPML if you were wondering) you would have heard that Zimbra 5.0 now supports Shared Folders. OMG! More than 116 users voted for the enhancement (no. 9396). Turns out it was hard:

Shared folders was a difficult one for us. There were a lot of server-side things that had to change. For example, this one feature depended on bugs 6082, 7527, 13101, 15634, 15637, 15773, and 7083. This means we had to resolve all of those issues/features before we could roll out Shared Folders.

Here’s how it works:

It all starts with this. A folder that I need to share with someone. In the folder, I have an RSS Feed.

A right click on the folder brings up a contextual menu. We click “Share Folder”.

Once we choose “Share Folder”, we are presented with the Share folder dialog. We can then use our autocomplete to share it with someone else. In this case, I’m sharing to Kevin Henrikson.

The user receives a notification that the Folder has been shared, and once accepted, it appears in the list of folders.