[Kde-pim] [Korganizer-devel] [Bug 68345] KOrganizer ignores timezone when importing iCalendar events

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Montag, 19. Februar 2007 schrieb J.Becker:
> THE PROBLEM WITH DROPPING THE EXCHANGE PLUGIN
>
> Dropping support for the Exchange plugin will mean that Kontact will become
> useless for most enterprise migrations: 

I know, I would LOVE to have / keep / improve exchange support in KOrganizer. 
You don't know how sad it makes me when someone asks for exchange support and 
I have to tell them that we don't have it, so they need to use Evolution.

However, exchange support was never really working: the old plugin/resource 
was not using syncronous actions, so the whole GUI would block while doing 
any communication with the server (and every GUI action would trigger such a 
communication). That worked only when the exchange server was very fast (i.e. 
on the same local network, but definitely not on the internet.

And the new exchange resource was never completely implemented (e.g. timezone 
support is missing, adresses and task don't really work, etc.), mainly due to 
lack of time / manpower working on KOrganizer (see below).

> the sad (very, very sad) fact is 
> that most enterprise messaging infrastructures are based around Exchange
> and since Exchange can be accessed with IMAP and POP3, meeting invites are
> the last major piece. 

Wait a second. I'm talking about accessing the calendar data stored on the 
server. We don't have proper support for that.
You are talking about invitations to meetings / events / todos sent out via 
iTIP/iMIP (via mail). Of course, KOrgnizer supports these, and they are not 
tied to Exchange at all, but rather specified in RFC 2446 and RFC 2447. 
We simply don't have a way to access the calendar stores on an exchange 
server, but we can perfectly understand and send out invitations from and to 
exchange servers.

> In fact, at a major Big Three automaker, lack of
> compatibility with Microsoft Exchange (Evolution has a lot of problems in
> this area, too: it's just a function of Exchange's very closed-box
> implementation) was the SINGLE defining problem that prevented them from
> doing a VERY large migration -- one of the world's largest -- to Linux on
> the desktop. We solved every other problem for them, except this one.
> (Because of years of legacy Exchange groupware applications built up across
> the enterprise, they were unwilling to switch to something better, like a
> Notes:Exchange bridge, or Notes entirely, or something like Openmail.)
>
> The bottom line is that group/shared calendaring is a major weak spot in
> open source software, especially with regards to compatibility with
> Exchange. IF this ONE problem was solved, even us geeks working in
> enterprise environments can work around other Linux:windows
> interoperability problems like connections to MS PPTP networks, or
> requirement of IE for internal applications, or whatever. But not being
> able to address a shared calendar and find out when meetings are... this is
> a killer. OWA doesn't even work most of the time.
>
> CALL TO ACTION
>
> Are there any volunteers that can provide an Exchange server for testing to
> a select group of KDE developers? 

Actually, we (danimo?) even have a copy of the exchange server with a 5-user 
license from Microsoft. 
The really huge problem is mainly that we simply don't have the manpower to 
work on it. I am - as the maintainer of KOrganizer - hardly able to allocate 
any time for KDE development at all (and if I do, that time needs to go into 
bug fixing or porting to KDE 4), and apart from me there is noone really 
working (not that I myself am really working on korganizer) on korganizer 
(bram and allen are doing bug fixes every now and then, which is even more 
often than I do, though).

Cheers,
Reinhold
- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
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/
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