From kde-pim Mon Jun 17 13:44:23 2002 From: Mike Pilone Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 13:44:23 +0000 To: kde-pim Subject: Re: [Kde-pim] [RFC]: KDE GroupWare solution X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-pim&m=102432168515586 On Saturday 15 June 2002 08:07 pm, Cornelius Schumacher wrote: > I don't think that we are "sticking" to the peer-to-peer approach. If > there is a server available which is accepted and has documented > interfaces we will add support for it. I will not repeat that writing a > server is out of the scope of KDE ;-) > > Adding support for a calendar server isn't that difficult. I have done > it myself in a simple way for a proprietary server solution. But the > benefit isn't very big. My personal opinion is that the role of a > server for calendaring is overrated, but you can prove me wrong. > Patches are welcome ;-) I think the huge success of Exchange server proves all of us wrong. Whether we think it is the correct approach or not doesn't matter when the demand of the office (usually the computer illiterate manager) is for simple group scheduling. This isn't an argument for what is the best solution to the problem or what is the coolest way to do something, but rather asking what the users want. There is no doubt in my mind that users (especially business) want group scheduling (and workflow). In the past I have worked in offices that used 100% outlook/exchange solutions and the office would completely fall apart without it. Like it or not, people do not want a 15 page tutorial on how to get p2p group scheduling involving 4 different applications. They want to start the application, create an appointment, invite someone from their addressbook, be told if the person is available, and be done with it. This is the task that a secratary used to perform and the old 'schedule a meeting by the coffee machine' was actually 'schedule a call between our secrataries so they can determine a time and place that is good for both of us'. We have the task of replicating that in software (now that all the high-ups have layed off all our secrataries). My current office has selected to use WebCalendar (a php based server solution) to provide this functionality because of its ability to do realtime conflict checking and calendar layering. Something I believe kde-pim still cannot do. I definately agree with Cornelius that writing a server is beyond the scope of KDE, however I think we could get away with using existing servers as others have suggested. vCard and iCal would both nicely fit into an LDAP or SQL database. Email is just fine on Pop3 or IMAP. It is true that we may have to define a schema or two, but that is easy since we have vCard and iCal to base it on. I would vote that we finish up for 3.1, then put some time into thinking of how to expand/integrate the pim libraries for both better inter-operation and plugable backends. Then spend the time from 3.1 -> 4.0 99% focused on implementing real server based pim support and scalability (the other 1% is on bug fixing 3.1) and not look at adding any new features until we get it implemented correctly. Also, making sure that all the applications correctly use these APIs. Ideally this pluggable support would let us also support the Exchange plugins better and actually be a valid contender to Evolution. Note that I didn't mention integrating the apps to an Outlook application, but I am not against the idea (assuming we still support the loading of parts). A single 'Use PIM server' option in kcontrol would transparently enable all the groupware type things we want and need. I think getting these libraries and APIs nailed down will make things so much easier in the long run. It appears that a majority of our effort is in playing catch-up with ourselves as the APIs constantly change (KPilot can confirm this over the past 3 years). Just my 2 cents. -mike -- Mike Pilone http://www.slac.com/mpilone/personal/ GPG Fingerprint = 856C 8B36 ECF7 9156 4611 7C6B C265 05C4 162F C3B5 See http://www.slac.com/mpilone/personal/mpilone_pub_key.gpg for full key. See http://www.gnupg.org for GPG information. _______________________________________________ kde-pim mailing list kde-pim@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim kde-pim home page at http://pim.kde.org/