[Kolab-devel] Concepts of "Groups" in LDAP

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Fabio,

Am Freitag, 7. Oktober 2005 12:45 schrieb Fabio Pietrosanti:
> i would like to know if in Kolab there is, or it's planned to be
> implemented, the concept of "Groups" .
>
> Categories of users that belong to groups.
> Groups that determine the privileges (roles) and details of users (like
> having for "Marketing Group" a default quota of 40MB).

so far the Kolab Server does not have such an approach of a "group"
of users or "roles" to do some common settings for a number of users.
It also is not directly on the roadmap, 
because the Kolab Server was designed to use the directory service
over LDAP as generic as possible to not get into the way of several 
ideas of how to maintain the directory contents.
This will allow us to integrate the Kolab Server with other more sofisticated
directory server maintenance tools like LAM, Gosa, DirActory or the one from 
UCS. 

> Kolab has now quite poor management capabilities and i got from my
> customer (which usually work with Active Directory) request in that
> directions.
>
> They asked about groups, asked why there are so many "tabs" for
> Administrators/Mainteiners/Domain Mainteiners whether this should be
> simply users with specific administrative capabilities.
>
> They criticized not the core kolab feature but the management
> functionality that has severe limitations when you have a huge amount of
> users with different class and conditions.
>
> That's not a criticisims, it's just a feedback i got from a big company
> now adopting kolab.

Yes, it is great to get such feedback.
It is on the point as Kolab's current webadmin interface has not seen a lot of
engineering to make it ready for a huge number of users.

Nevertheless I think it is good that the Kolab Server currently offers such a 
simple interface. If there is a good opportunity, we will improve the 
interface, however this is not a high priority.
 
> What are the directions of the project regarding the enanchments of web
> management interfaces?
>
> What about adopting already existing and quite completed approach like
> Gosa http://oss.gonicus.de/gosa (obviously stripping out that's not
> really needed for kolab) ?

The Kolab Konsortium cooperates with Univention to integrate the Kolab Server
into their offering. It also cooperates with Gonicus to do the same for GOsa.
Somebody made a description with LAM if I remember correctly.
So the integration work will continue so that customers gete a really good 
solution and there is competition between directory service management tools.

Best,
Bernhard