[Kroupware] public folders (was: Re: Kroupware replacing Exchange)

[Henning Holtschneider]

--On Mittwoch, 5. Februar 2003 09:31 +0100 Bo Thorsen <bo@sonofthor.dk> 
wrote:

>> 6. creating public folders storing calendar data, tasks,
>> contact information and emails?
>
> I don't know what you mean by public folders. Do you mean uploading all

Did you *ever* see an Exchange/Outlook combo in action? I suppose, no ;-)

Public folders in Exchange are mailbox folders available to everyone 
connected to an Exchange organization. The folders will appear in a 
seperate tree of your Exchange mailbox an can be arranged in a hierarchical 
order. Access can be controlled through ACLs. All elements that you can 
store in your personal folders (email messages, contacts, tasks etc.) can 
be stored in a public folder, too. Additionally, you can feed Usenet news 
into public folders on the Exchange server.

In theory, this works on the Kolab server, too. It offers public IMAP 
folders through Cyrus with ACLs. But at least  Outlook/InsightConnector 
(haven't tried the KDE client yet) can only store email messages in those 
public folders. You can circumvent this problem by creating a regular user 
on the server just for sharing. Additionally, public folders will not 
appear in a seperate "tree" in Outlook but simply at the bottom of your 
folder list together with folders shared by other users (see below).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK the bottom of the problem is 
this: the IMAP protocol specifies "public folders" as folders of a given 
user which are visible to others - nothing more. To make things more 
complicated, Cyrus introduced public folders on their IMAP server. On the 
server side, this is a public folder as we know from Outlook (i.e. it 
doesn't belong to a user) but the IMAP protocol has no way to distinguish 
between "shared" folders and "public" folders. I think this is why 
IMAP-derived developers like Bo have problems understanding the term 
"public folder" ;-)

At least our customers who are running Exchange are extensively using 
public folders to share company-wide information such as contacts and 
calender events (who is on vacation?). When switching to an IMAP-based 
system, this would be a big change for them :-/

hh