[Kolab-devel] On the road to Kolab 3.0

[Georg C. F. Greve]

On Sunday 11 December 2011 23.32:53 Del wrote:
> It will be interesting to look into the new Roundcube based web-interface.

FWIW, if you "just" want to test it on a non-productive, non-public system, we 
can set you up with an account on a test/demo instance that is under active 
development -- so may behave glitchy at times -- but would allow you to have a 
look around.

You can request such an account by sending email to 

	sysadmin-main+kolab at klab.cc

providing your name and email address with which you're subscribed on this 
list. 


> However, I am a bit in the dark with respect to how this relates to Horde.
> Is the intention to replace both Horde and the current web-admin? If so, I
> am a bit concerned with respect to developer resources.

Whose and which developer resources are you talking about?

Thus far it has been virtually exclusively Kolab Systems developing the server 
after we took over from Intevation & KDAB. We have set up a paid project with 
Alain's company to get Z-Push integrated, and he has afterwards continued to 
contribute issue fixes as he was able to, but other than that the number of 
outside contributions have been minimal. 

So our estimation of feasibility involve primarily our own developers. That's 
why we are quite optimistic we can make things happen, but we also finally want 
to open up the process for contributions by others. 

I don't think that more developers will likely allow us to do less, in fact we 
really welcome contribution by the community, which is why we've invested the 
effort to make this easier, and to provide a process by which others can hook 
into the release process.

As to the two components you were talking about, they are obviously unrelated, 
so need to be viewed separately. The web admin is hard-coded against a whole 
set of assumptions, including a particular LDAP layout & schema which makes it 
very hard to use this in the future.

So replacing it has become inevitable for allowing the kinds of deployments 
we're seeing, but the efforts for this are not all that great, to be honest. 

Or current goal for the next major release is just to get the new, modular, 
extensible web admin to have the same capabilities as the current one has, and 
to make sure a "green field" installation can do the same things that it can do 
now with regards administration -- minus the ActiveSync configuration, that is, 
as that is also in the clients, and putting it into the admin really was a 
stopgap measure.

As for Horde, there are two parts to it: The framework & the client.

Although the process is not yet complete, it is now possible to use Roundcube 
for Email, address book, calendar & mobile phone settings on Kolab. We will be 
looking at Notes & Tasks as soon as we can, but for the moment this provides 
the set of functionality that 95% of users are using regularly.

Of course, if someone on this list says that they really, really want to 
support notes and contribute towards a module for that, we would gladly 
support them in any way we can -- the effort would not be humongous.

If you're thinking about working on tasks, I'd strongly suggest to take a look 
at http://zanshin.kde.org, in particular, as GTD based approaches are what we 
would like to explore. The good news in this: Because Zanshin is still not 
feature complete, trying to do the same on the web would be easier. 

Again: Anyone who would like to work on either of these components would be 
met with open arms. Naturally, it will remain possible to use Horde on top of 
Kolab for as long as Horde supports its Kolab backend.

For that, the now ongoing development cycle should be quite helpful, in fact, 
as the framework component is hard coded in Horde 3, which is deprecated by 
Horde & Kolab is the only user, and translating it to Horde 4 will be quite a 
task, so will keeping it up to date with the evolution of the format and such.

Having these aspects wrapped in a format & access library which are usable 
from PHP should make that task a lot easier for anyone who wants to bring 
Horde onto the new Kolab server, and of course we'll be happy to work with 
anyone who wants to do this.

FWIW, the same is true if you have "your favorite client" that you really want 
to see on the server. We can't promise developer resource, but otherwise we'll 
be happy to provide you with the means of making that happen and work with you 
in any way we can.

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve
Chief Executive Officer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: greve at kolabsys.com
t: +41 78 904 43 33
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve