Some Notes About the Help in the Oracle Zimbra Client

One thing that is a bit annoying in the Oracle Zimbra Client for Beehive is that the help that is included in the client is not modified to reflect that changes that has been made to the client from Oracle's side. Instead comes the Zimbra client with the standard Zimbra help and there are many things there that is likely to confuse your end users.

For example, it contains a section about "Instant Messaging Basics", but there is no instant messaging functions in the Oracle version of the Zimbra client. Some other things that are mentioned but not exists are Spell Check, Multiple signatures, Conversations, Zimlets and many more. As these things are mentioned but non existent will most likely confuse you end users.

So what we have done is instead written our own instruction on how-to use the Zimbra web client and put these instructions on our Intranet. Then we have redirected the Help link in the Beehive Zimbra client to point there instead.

To implement the redirection you can just change the file:

<BEEHIVE_HOME>/j2ee/BEECLIENT/applications/zimbra-ui/zimbra/help/en_US/advanced/Zimbra_User_Help.htm

and implement a simple HTTP redirect there. If you have multiple BEECLIENT instances you need to implement the change in each of them (putting a soft link in place won't work here).

Also, just be careful that when you apply a patch or upgrade Beehive you most likely will have to re-implement this change.