Preannounce: Kroupware Project started

[Matthias Kalle Dalheimer]

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 at kde.org and kmail at 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 <bernhard at intevation.de>
Kalle Dalheimer <kalle at kde.org>

-- 
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President&CEO/VD
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB
Platform-independent software solutions
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