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

[Tassilo Erlewein]

On Wednesday 05 February 2003 11:10, Bo Thorsen wrote:

> Yes and no. We have the LDAP contacts working fine, so that's a
> replacement for the shared folder (note: the LDAP IO slave in KDE 3.1 is
> readonly, so uploading a new contact can only be done with the web
> interface. I agree this is a problem. In KDE cvs, the slave is read/write
> so you can save contacts directly to the LDAP server). Actually it's IMHO
> even a better way to have contacts on LDAP than in a shared folder,
> because you can get to them from other LDAP enabled applications too.

That's a point that has been quite often discussed.
We use to differentiate two things (actually three ;-)):

1. "Address Book"
   seldom changed, freqently accessed, comparable to a phone book
   this is LDAP
   Outlook and Exchange speak LDAP
   Kolab's LDAP information is accessible by outlook clients.

2. "Contacts"
    frequently changed, often individually used, comparable to a personal=20
    collection of business cards
    this in Outlook is simply a folder with multi-part mime email with
    business card information attached
    we do in Kolab exactly the same, only we want to use the vcard format.
    Outlook can read vcard

3. a mixture of the above=20
    a "collection of business cards" for a certain user group, frequently
    accessed and modified
    we can do that with a shared/public folder consisting of above mentioned
    emails. No difference, only that it's not a subfolder of your INBOX.
    Where you attach it to your folder view is up to you.
    Unfortunately you will have to wait a bit for the KDE client to
    support IMAP shared folders.

LDAP IMHO is a good thing if you seldom change something, you need very=20
often read and authentication access. LDAP is IMHO not suited to run a=20
company-wide contact database, which is frequently changed by lots of users.
Think of a phone book. You don't change it yourself but fill in a sheet
and let the telephone company (administrators, maintainers) change it.=20

We slightly modified this approach because of a customer demand.
In Kolab, a user can update his own LDAP entry in the global address book.

I hope this clearifies everything a little bit.

=2D-=20
Dipl.-Ing. Tassilo Erlewein

e r f r a k o n
Erlewein, Frank, Konold & Partner - Beratende Ingenieure und Physiker
Nobelstra=DFe 15, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
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email: tassilo.erlewein@erfrakon.de