[Kroupware] kolab & outlook connectors (synchronization vs. "live updates")

[Frederik Himpe]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating a free software groupware solution, with a server
running Linux and Outlook 2000 clients.

I installed kolab under Mandrake 10.0, from Mandrake's kolab package.
Installation went very smoothly. I hope the kolab team will work together
with other distro's to integrate kolab, because to me this seems crucial
for further widespread adoption.

Now on the client side, we tested Outlook 2000 with the Toltec connector.
We encountered a few problems:

- When marking an appointment in a calendar as "private", other
people to which the calendar folder was shared, could still see the
appointment and read all its details.

- changes to the calendar did not always update the free/busy information,
or at least not immediately.

- When a user adds an appointment for another user via its shared
calendar, the free/busy information of this other user, did not seem to
get updated.

Now I think that these last two problems were due to the fact that changes
to a calendar and free/busy information are stored locally first, and
are only saved on the server when the data is synchronized later on,
either manually, either when a certain time has passed, either when a
folder gets selected.

I'm planning to test the Bynari connector soon, but as far as I see, it
also seems to work with regular synchronization intervals instead of live
server updates.

Why is it so these connectors don't store the data directly on the server?
Technically, it should be possible that clients update the calendar and
free/busy information immediately when a change is made, while clients
could receive immediately change notificiations via the IMAP IDLE
extension, no?

Is there a chance this could get implemented?

How do other clients such as kontact and Aethera handle this?

Thanks,
Frederik