Kolab client integration

Bo Thorsen bo at sonofthor.dk
Tue Jul 13 14:14:50 CEST 2004


On Tuesday 13 July 2004 14:08, Bo Thorsen wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 July 2004 13:37, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 July 2004 13:11, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 13 July 2004 11:03, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > > > I guess I am allergic to strange "magic" criticism. ;-)
> > > > Cornelius and many others can configure it
> > > > and him saying: "Nobody can" is overplaying it.
> > >
> > > That's right. I was exaggerating to get my point through, that the
> > > configuration is overly complex. It would be much easier with the
> > > wizard. I think we agree on that.
> >
> > In general I think that wizards are suboptimal
> > and usually a sign that othe parts of the design not good enough.
> > Wizards can even lower the usability with introducing
> > another way of doing the same think often with less understanding.
> > Probably this is not the right place for such a general debate.
> > With Kolab (and any groupware) users need some more understanding
> > of the issues, a simple "configuration" is not the usual case.
>
> I have to side with Cornelius when we're on the subject of setting up
> Kolab support. Only a few things are actually needed: Your name, login,
> password, email address and server host. Everything can be set up after
> this so Kontact behaves well in a Kolab setting.
>
> Configuration *could* be simple, but it isn't.
>
> There are two big problems with the wizard stuff in kdepim that stopped
> me when I tried working on it previously: It can only do initial setup,
> and the accounts of KMail is hard (almost impossible) to support. And a
> wizard that trashes your current settings is really suboptimal. That
> doesn't mean it's useless, because you do have to start somewhere...

This sounds too much like I'm trying to blame the wizard stuff for us not 
doing the wizard. That's not intended. I think the wizard implementation 
is a really good start with lots of good things in it. That there is room 
for improvement is not reason we didn't get to doing the wizard so far.

Bo.

-- 

     Bo Thorsen                 |   Praestevejen 4
     Senior Software Engineer   |   5290 Marslev
     Klarälvdalens Datakonsult  |   Denmark
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