[Kde-soc-mentor] Fwd: KOrganizer

[Kleag]

Hello,

I totaly agree with Reinhold as I am exactly in this case. Luckily enough I 
have an IMAP access to my mailboxes but for agenda and other resources, it is 
much more difficult.
Even if I make all possible efforts (so as other ones too) to enhance the 
support of tools other than the MS ones, it is very difficult to change the 
habits of a big company, and particularly of their IT people.
I'm able to live with the current problems because I'm a computer scientist 
and a FLOSS evangelist (at my little level), but I cannot ask non-computer 
people to do the same. So, better interoperability with the proprietary and 
closed tools is really needed, I think.

Regards,

Kleag
Le mardi 10 avril 2007, Reinhold Kainhofer a écrit :
> 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.



-- 
KsirK - a turn-based strategy game for KDE
http://gna.org/projects/ksirk

KGraphViewer - a GraphViz dot graphs viewer
http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kgraphviewer