[Kolab-devel] share documents in IMAP-folders in a filesystem-like manner

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Ingo Steuwer <steuwer at univention.de> writes:

> Am Mittwoch, 18. April 2007 11:39 schrieb Gunnar Wrobel:
>> Hi Ingo,
>>
>> > We'd like to have a document and e-mail share, which would allow to
>> > access/save emails and documents (files like office-documents, pdf, CAD
>> > and so on) in one storage.
>> >
>> > The idea is to store thoese documents as mail-attachements in IMAP
>> > folders. This would allow an access whith all IMAP-clients and an
>> > integration in existing Kolab-servers.
>> >
>> > What would be needed further is a platform-independed filesystem-mapping
>> > which should allow to open or modify at least the attached file from
>> > Windows an Linux. Possible solutions would be to implement an mapping for
>> > example as samba-VFS-plugin or to provide some WebDAV-Compliant access to
>> > IMAP-folders.
>>
>> There are certainly many solution possible here. My personal favourite
>> would be to add a kolab specific driver to Gollem (Horde web client
>> file manager) and to extend the Gollem API so that you can have
>> external access to the files. Since Horde comes with the necessary
>> libraries for WEBDAV access you could easily map your files onto a
>> WEBDAV system and at the same time manage them over the web frontend.
>
> But that means that other IMAP-Clients (Kontact, Outlook etc.) doesn't see 
> those files? 

Yes, my initial comment was imprecise. I looked at Gollem again and it
makes no sense to use the tools currently provided by the Kolab Module
for this task. One would have to define a new XML format for "files"
and both Kontact and Outlook would not see that. And in fact it would
not make much sense because mail attachments are a well established
concept and embedding this into another XML wrapper does not seem
reasonable.

You would need to create an IMAP driver for the Horde virtual file
system that uses attachments as a storage object. This would not be
too complex I believe.

> A possible workflow should be:
> 1) receive a mail with an attached file
> 2) move it into an IMAP-Folder
> 3) access the attached file in a filesystem-like manner (i.e. kpdf -> file -> 
> open)

This would then be possible with the VFS driver.

> In this case Horde needs to be IMAP-client and WebDAV-server, but the later 
> isn't implemented yet, right?

WebDAV is available
(http://cvs.horde.org/framework/RPC/RPC/webdav.php) but one would need
to extend the Gollem API so that it allows remote access to its
procedures.

Cheers,

Gunnar

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