client compatibility (was: Re: [kroupware] About mozilla calendar ...)

[Henning Holtschneider]

Am Mon, 2003-01-20 um 14.17 schrieb Manuel Hoppe:

> So finally, is someone interested to found a project or join the 
> existing calendar team and develop a compatible client?

My personal opinion: if this project wants to get further than all the
other half-finished groupware projects, people must not ask "why is my
favorite client XY not supported" because there is not even *one* single
finished client on *one* at all. Apart from that, there is no need to
support more than one client per platform because it just makes the
end-user and developer support more difficult.

Now the technical side ;-) I think there are two areas where work has to
be done in parallel to the *nix/KDE client or after that client has
reached a production state.

1. Windows client
-----------------

As Andreas Jellinghaus pointed out back in September, the Bynari
InsightConnector - which is the reference interface to the server on the
Windows platform - stores the data on the server in a proprietary format
which can only be read by InsightConnector. So, if you start off under
Windows and then wish to switch your client platform to Linux, you
cannot transfer any other data than your emails.

I do not like the idea of yet another client. Programming and
maintaining an email client is a huge task and people won't like it
anyway because is does not look familiar. I'm not thinking of geeks,
developers or early adopters - I'm thinking of normal users who know how
to use Word and Excel. If you want the Kolab server to be successful in
a business environment, the Windows client has to be Outlook. 

The first approach would be a MAPI provider which enables Outlook to
store its information on a server instead of the local .pst storage.

Programming a MAPI provider is no easy task, but Kervin L. Pierre has
started a project on Sourceforge (http://otlkcon.sourceforge.net/) in
November. There has been no (visible) progress since then but
considering Kervin's message to this list, he won't start working on it
until about now ;-)

There also is an interesting article by one of the developers behind
Bynari's InsightConnector in the January 2003 issue of Linux Journal. He
describes how they got Outlook to talk to an IMAP server in workgroup
mode. I received the issue this morning and only had a quick look at the
article. From what I read, getting the information (i.e. task
properties, contact information etc.) instead of the data "chunk" is
very difficult so it remains to be seen if the MAPI/Outlook plugin
approach makes sense at all.

2. Web-based client
-------------------

If the clients on the two major supported operating systems share the
same data format, we can think about a web client. It doesn't have to be
look-alike like Outlook Web Access but the user should be able to view
all the pieces of information created with the KDE/Windows client.

I think this part is fairly easy (i.e. one could use a modified version
of an existing IMAP client like Squirrelmail) but it requires that the
platform-specific clients use the same data format. 

Regards,
hh