[Kde-pim] Fwd: Google SoC Project Idea: Kontact Exchange

Thu Apr 12 12:20:27 BST 2007

Hello,

Although my SoC project idea was not selected, I still think it would be very 
important to Kontact.  I thought for sure it would have been selected, but I 
guess others had better ideas for KDE PIM that were more in line with a SoC 
project.  Regardless, I'd like to pursue this project anyway.  Would one or 
more people care to mentor me?  I'm sure there are others significantly more 
familiar with Kontact and KDE development processes than I.

Thanks very much.

-- 
Vic Fryzel (vic at shellsage dot com)
http://shellsage.com/
Key id C7B780CA = 3235 2261 807B 451C DA4D  DFBA CAA7 80CF C7B7 80CA

On Monday 26 February 2007 4:44:45 am Vincent Panel wrote:
> On 2/26/07, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> > FYI, this was sent to kde-devel at kde.org.
> >
> > --
> >  Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
> >   PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
> >   E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C 966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Vic Fryzel <vic at shellsage.com>
> > To: kde-devel at kde.org
> > Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:14:54 -0500
> > Subject: Google SoC Project Idea: Kontact Exchange
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'd very much like to contribute to KDE via the Google Summer of Code.  I
> > think that I have two good project ideas (the first of which is listed
> > below), and have no problem putting forth the required effort to
> > contribute features.  I've already contributed patches to the KDE
> > project, am an active Gentoo developer, and develop a lot of open source
> > software in my spare time.
> >
> > Please take the time to review, comment on, and build on my proposal, and
> > I very much appreciate any feedback.  I'll submit it as soon as the web
> > interface for proposal submissions is available.
> >
> > My preliminary project proposal for full Kontact Exchange integration
> > follows:
> >
> > Who are you? What are you studying?
> > My name is Vic Fryzel.  I'm pursuing a B.S. and M.S. in Software
> > Engineering.
> >
> > What exactly do you intend to do? What will not be done?
> > It is my intent to bring the MS Exchange implementation in Kontact to be
> > as feature-complete as Evolution.  I intend for this to be included in
> > KDE4.  It is not my intent to affect any other features of Kontact that
> > are unrelated to getting Exchange integration to work, unless a new
> > feature is required by Exchange integration.
> >
> > Why are you the right person for this task?
> > I'm the right person for the task because I have substantial open source
> > software development experience, a significant will to see Kontact and
> > KDE become more popular and widely used, and use both KDE and Evolution
> > on a daily basis, so I know what's missing from Kontact.  I'm also
> > familiar with Qt and the KDE libraries.
> >
> > How many hours are you going to work on this a week?
> > I'm prepared to work as many as 30-40 hours per week on this project.  My
> > other commitments include my full-time day job as a software engineer.
> >
> > Are you comfortable working independently under a remote supervisor or
> > mentor? I'm comfortable working independently under a supervisor or
> > mentor who is at a remote location.  I'd set weekly goals for the
> > project, and discuss these goals and my progess weekly (or less
> > frequently based upon the requirements of the mentor) with my mentor. 
> > I've already had experience with this sort of thing in becoming a Gentoo
> > developer, where a large number of the developers live in Europe, and I
> > live in the U.S.
> >
> > What is your native language?
> > My native language is English.
> >
> > Where do you live?
> > I live in Rochester, NY, USA;  a local mentor would be spectacular, but
> > I've yet to meet a KDE developer from the area.
> >
> > To what extent are you familiar with the software you're proposing to
> > work with?
> > I'm very familiar with Kontact and KDE development in general.  I've
> > read the source code (I've already looked into further implementing
> > Exchange integration in Kontact just in my spare time).  I've begun to
> > modify the source to perform better calendar Exchange queries, but have
> > nothing patch-ready, although all of my work has been on the KDE trunk,
> > so it is all going towards KDE4.  I have used C++ for many work-related
> > projects, and am familiar with Qt and the KDE libraries.  I'm also very
> > familiar with MS Exchange queries, and have written work-related
> > applications to query Exchange servers for data such as one's mail
> > folder/email information, and appointment/meeting information;  this
> > included the handling of meeting requests.
>
> Hi,
>
> I know a bit exchange as I've migrated a company from exchange 5.5 to
> an exchange 2003 cluster.
>
> The major problem being that exchange uses natively protocols no one
> has ever implemented under linux (even evolution) : X400 and X500. Of
> course these are "microsoft" protocols which means they have probably
> added proprietary, undocumented features to these protocols. Exchange
> also uses imap, pop3 and webdav. But you can disable all three of them
> and only outlook users will be able to use exchange. Evolution uses
> webdav access, so they don't implement the native protocol either.
>
> The other problem is the calendar integration with the exchange
> server. I think you should be able to keep a local copy of your
> exchange calendar, but synchronize it with the server, so in the
> current state, the best way to do this is via opensync and writing a
> plugin for it.
>
> You have almost the same synchronization problem with contacts.
>
> I also notice some people sometimes use the "vote" mechanism of
> outlook/exchange and kmail doesn't deal with it at all.
>
> One last thing is public folders : these are mail folders shared among
> several people (and generally open read/write to a group of people).
>
> Now things that does work in the current kmail state  :
> - If imap is turned on, kmail deals with exchange rather well
> - kmail is able to display meeting requests, deal with them (accept /
> decline / tentative and send a response to the sender) and add the
> meeting in your (local) calendar
> - you can get your exchange contacts and access the exchange GAL if
> you configure LDAP in the configuration page of kadressbook. But here,
> there's another difficulty : for a NT domain, the GAL is on the
> exchange server and for a 2003 domain, it's on the Domain Controllers
> of the domain. It's possible you can get the domain controller by
> querying the exchange server, but I don't know how to do it. The other
> way to get it is by querying the domain in a samba-way (samba is able
> to tell you the domain controller with only the domain name).
>
> I think an exchange wizard to configure all these pieces of kmail in
> one go would be much appreciated, otherwise, you have to configure all
> these things in kmail, then in kadressbook, then in korganizer.
>
> My two pennies...
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