Preannouncement: Kroupware Project for KDE (KMail, KOrganizer) starting This is a note to developers that a new project has been started to significantly enhance the available groupware functionality for KDE and Free software in general. The working name of the project is Kroupware. Because of the tight schedule of the project, we send this email to inform the developers as fast as possible. More details will be made available as soon as we can publish them. Erfrakon, Intevation and Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB have won a bid to write a Free software groupware server and client for the German "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik" (Federal Agency for IT Security, BSI). It aims to work in a heterogenous environment and provide email, contacts, appointments and tasks lists. Server components will be OpenLDAP, Cyrus IMAP, Postfix, and more. The KDE client side will be implemented by using and extending KMail, KOrganizer and other KDE components. We plan to do the development in an open manner appropriate for Free software projects. We want to handle the project in a way that will leverage and add to the work of other developers and want to win your collaboration; you are cordially invited to participate in this endeavour. We have an open mailinglist for technical discussions, please see http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kroupware. Of course, we will also follow - and participate in - the discussions on kde-pim@kde.org and kmail@kde.org. The project deadline forbids us to follow the normal KDE development schedule, and we are also concerned about introducing instability into KMail and KOrganizer at this point in the KDE 3.1 release cycle. We will therefore create our own branch called kroupware_branch in the modules kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and kdepim. We aim to retrofit the changes on this branch as timely as possible back into the HEAD branch; this will happen in close collaboration with the maintainers of the affected projects, and following the KDE release cycle. More information will be made available from the following website. kroupware.kde.org (Note: Website basically empty at the time of writing.) We will also post requirements documents, design specifications, etc. there. 10.9.2002 Bernhard Reiter Kalle Dalheimer -- Matthias Kalle Dalheimer President&CEO/VD Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB Platform-independent software solutions