[Kde-soc-mentor] Fwd: KOrganizer

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Freitag, 6. April 2007 schrieb Cornelius Schumacher:
> I have to say that I don't share the assessment that Exchange support is
> the most important missing feature for business adoption of KOrganizer.

Well, that depends on what you call "business adoption". If you are thinking 
about a whole company switching to KDE (or Linux in general), then I totally 
agree that Exchange doesn't really play a role, as that company can also 
introduce a new groupware server during the migration.[1]


However, that's not what I meant with "business user" (rather than business 
adoption). I'm mainly thinking about individuals who want to use KDE in their 
company, but can't because their company employs an exchange server. So their 
only choice is either to use the web-frontend entirely or to use Evolution. 
Both are suboptimal choices ;-)

I recently applied to a few consulting companies, and each of them employs an 
Exchange server. From what I learnt, Exchange is really ubiquituous in most 
companies, so we leave a lot of people out in the cold. So as soon as I take 
up such a job offer (I decided to stay at university for the time being, 
btw), I can no longer user KOrganizer... 

Judging from the requests that we get (although we have several mails in the 
mailing list archives that we no longer support Exchange due to time 
constraints), Exchange support IS the most-requested missing feature in 
KOrganizer.

The other issue is that we can't wait until someone pays for Exchange support, 
as the companies that employ Exchange servers, are usually not out to switch 
to Linux and need Exchange support, but rather tolerate individual users to 
use KDE on their machines. However, they won't support these users, who are 
then entirely dependent on the level of Exchange support that we provide.
In this case, also your argument that KDE should be out to support one server 
perfectly (which you think should be Kolab) and no other servers, only hurts 
the users and thus also ourselves. 

We are simply not in a position to demand from companies to switch their 
groupware server (which has probably cost them a lot of money for consulting 
and licensing already), just because a few users want to use KDE. To be 
realistic, the majority will still use Windows and that won't change that 
soon. Can we really permanently ignore this situation?

> Additionally I don't think that addressing needs of business users is the
> primary target of the Summer of Code. 

Okay, let's call them "individual users which need exchange support due to 
their job". Aren't they a primary target of KDE? If so, they are also a 
primary target of the SoC.

Cheers,
Reinhold


[1] Well, I also had one or two reports that a company switched to Gnome 
rather than KDE, simply because evolution has exchange support. So even in 
that case, lack of Exchange support is already hurting us. Maybe not hurting 
badly, but still hindering us.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: reinhold at kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/