[Kroupware] Outlook compatibility with Kroupware clients

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tuesday 21 October 2003 00:45, Jonathon Sim wrote:
> Several posts here on the list suggest that although you can connect
> Outlook to the Kolab *Server* with these products, it is impossible to
> actually share anything with the KDE/Web clients with them because they use
> the Microsoft-specific TNEF encoding to store the data.

That is true. OL+Connector will write and read TNEF in the mails
on the server. Other Kolab clients will write standard formats.
So you cannot read/write access the groupware folders of one account
from client mixing this architecture.

Those clients cooperate because most of the interaction between
accounts is done sending invitations and feedback via email between
the clients (not by writing it on the server).

The architecture document describes the necessary settings for this
at the place you were pointed at.

> This seems to be in contradiction with information in the architecture
> manual : ie
> http://www.erfrakon.de/projects/kolab/documentation/architecture/c540.html
>
> which suggests that by adding these settings:
> "2. Email Format" "Senden im Nachrichtenformat" : "Nur Text"  (presumably
> "send in format" : text, although I don't actually speak any German)
> 3. "Internet Mail" "MIME : Quoted Printable" "
>
> you can get Outlook+Bynari to use an open text format rather than TNEF. 
> Then the format is (supposidely) vcard/vcal attachments that Kolab should
> be able to read.

It is correct, OL+Bynari will use a standard format 
when sending or receiving emails, but will continue to write TNEF
encoded stuff in its own account on the server.

> So my question is : am I reading this right, and is this information still
> correct?.  

I hope I've clarified the situation.

> Has anyone tried making the appropriate changes in Outlook to
> see what they get?  If necessary I can write a script to munge the data
> from Outlook into another format if it isn't quite right, but it would sure
> help if it was just text :-)

Though we cannot write TNEF with the necessary MAPI attributes in the binary
it is possible to reasonably understand its contents.
This is not enough to read-write and thus "share" an account,
but it would help you trying to write a script to one way convert data.


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