[Owncloud] General question about external contribution

[Yoann Gini]

Hello,

I’m a french freelance system administrator, certified trainer and consultant for Apple. I’m also a OS X and iOS developer when it’s needed.

I’ve just discover ownCloud yesterday and I’ve try it a couple of hour. You GUI is really cool, like your list of functionalities, but I’ve a really big problem with your integration capabilities and your GUI for administrator…

What you need to think when you provide a solution to a customer and say « build your own cloud » is the integration to existing components… For example, when I’ve discover your project I’ve plane to deploy it on every server of my different client, but I can’t for the following problems :
— The calendar service can’t be connected to a existing CalDAV Server. We already have our data publish in CalDAV with OS X Server, your UI would be really cool but we can’t…
— Exactly the same thing for CardDAV…
— The LDAP capabilities are bogus… And the LDAP Group capabilities don’t work at all ! You need to provide a official apps who handle completely the LDAP feature.
— File sharing, it’s a good idea but I don’t care about a new data store, I’ve already my data hosted on my server… What we need here is a possibility to aggregate different existing share point in ownCloud. And it’s exactly the same thing with personal share point. In professional setup, users have their home folder hosted on a server, what we need is the ability to link ownCloud to their existing home folder…

About the GUI for administrator, I’ve noticed two big problem :
— display all settings in one page is unusable for system administrator, you need to make different settings page for different apps. Keep the settings pane for ownCloud settings and display the apps settings in the apps pane.
— we need to be able to setup a apps before enable it… For example, I’ve add the group_ldap apps from your apps repository (because the built-in won’t work at all). When I’ve enable group_ldap on my ownCloud, the system has eject me for my admin interface… The group_ldap has been enabled but without settings it consider anything as standard user, just because the default app settings don’t match with my LDAP…

Nevertheless I’m really interested by your project, it’s good basement even if they have a lot of work to make it usable in production environment, so I’m wondering what is your politic about external contribution when it’s about the general architecture of the project ? Are you interested by a point of view of system administrator or should I fork your project and do what I want on my side ?

Best regards,
Yoann Gini.
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