[Kolab-devel] Kolab Support for the Toltec Connector

[RLake at oxfam.org.pe]

> But what about sub folders? When a user creates a sub folder
> with a arbitrary name, how will this be translated?

It wouldn't be, unless the user wanted it to be (unlikely).
I'm just talking about folders which have specific meaning
to other components, like the mail server itself: inbox,
outbox, drafts, news, maybe a handful of others.

> Babel Fish or will users only be allowed to create
> sub folders from a list of approved folder names?

A user could create any folder name they chose to, but
the automatically created folders would be from an approved
list.

Although the idea of having a small vocabulary of approved
names is an interesting one. One experiment I tried was to
allow a public subfolder in every folder. (Público, actually).
That folder automatically got world read, in effect.

So the view other people had of your data store
was the bit that you had moved into some public
folder. Now the public subfolder itself isn't visible to
other people: the server just appends public to the path
when it is looking in someone else's mailbox.

In that case, you need to (or at least I wanted to) do
automatic translation of one folder name, even if it
were a subfolder. The integration effort was beyond
my capabilities with the toolset I was using at the time,
but I still think it would be a good idea.

> This create a few problem for me. 

> 1)If I have to tell a system administrator that if a virus strikes his
> organization he will have to reinstall, map folder types and rename
> folders for 2000 clients, he will not buy my product. ( Actually
> he will die laughing. )

True. On the other hand, if you talk to a "product sourcing specialist",
they might happily buy your product. The success of some products
demonstrates this :)

> 2)I have to adhere to the limitation set to me by Outlook.
> I need to now what type a folder is when creating it.
> Normal users will not know how to map this folder and so
> they will phone the administrator. ( As an administrator
> you can image handling 3000 calls like this. Been there, done that. )

Yes, I understand that, and I sympathise. That is the problem
when moronic solutions become industry standards :)

> We can argue about the best/ideal model to do this.
> This, however, does not bring me closer to supporting the Kolab clients.

Very true, and I doubt whether I can provide any insights into
that. I'm sorry.

The only thing I can think of here is to add your own hidden
folder with your own metadata in it; you can use that to map
names to types, for example. That would have to be configured,
but maybe it could just be done once rather than per user (or
at least, once per language) with some simple web interface.
But since I don't know exactly what you're doing, I doubt
whether I can say anything rational -- I was just trying to
inject some ideas about a way forward from the mess we're
in (in general terms).

It is interesting that web browsers do translation on parts
of the LDAP schema, by the way -- so it can be done.

Rici.