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

Nice, Ben Klang actually implemented the necessary WebDAV read-access
for gollem and submitted it yesterday:

http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=5337

It is not integrated in Horde (yet) but taking this patch and my very
rough IMAP-VFS driver you should be able to get this functionality
already now. Probably still needs some debugging and package building
but the basic bits and pieces are there.

Cheers,

Gunnar

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