[Kolab-devel] Completing ActiveSync integration in Kolab, and a request for input on IMAP annotatemore extensions

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Hi all,

Alain Abbas and myself have been sitting together on Monday to discuss the 
roadmap for completing ActiveSync integration in Kolab.

This follows on some early discussions and a meeting that Paul and I had with 
CeBIT where we agreed to work together on Z-Push with the people at Zarafa, so 
the Kolab connector to Z-Push would become part of the main Z-Push repository.

Everything starts off with another release of the current code during this 
week. As of next week, development will focus on

        - Finish update to Z-Push 1.3
        - Complete subfolder support
        - Special characters (accents & umlauts) support
        - Track down & resolve push issues
                (Alain discovered last week there is a  memory leak on
                the server when using the iPhone's push synchronisation
		feature.)

to be release for testing the week after (week 13). Everyone interested in 
ActiveSync functionality is then encouraged to test this as much as possible 
in order for a release in week 14. Weeks 15 & 16 will see development on

 	- Annotation & Configuration Management (see below)
        - Cut off date implementation (complication: recurrence)
        - Z-Push module configuration management
        - ACL for ActiveSync (which user is allowed to use it)

with week 17 for testing. This will be followed by similar cycles to complete 
the functionality and provide some cleanup in the backend to prepare for the 
1.0 release in a few months.

For the moment, the bigger issue is the configuration management, which we have 
begun discussing internally with Thomas, Sascha and others and believe that 
the best (and most "Kolabian") way forward is likely to store this in the IMAP 
annotatemore extensions.

So we plan to introduce a

	/vendor/kolab/activesync

which defaults to YES, if not set, and which is a string of the format

                <BOOL>[;<SERIAL NO>:<BOOL>[;<SERIAL NO>:<BOOL>[...]]]

        with <BOOL> = 1 or 0 (for yes or no)
        and <SERIAL NO> = serial number of the phone

to allow a per-device setting of synchronisation preferences.

In order to make these preferences per-user, this annotation needs to be per-
user-writeable, including for

	(a) shared folders where user has at least (but maybe only) read access
        (b) other user's folders to which the user has read access (or more)

The IMAP annotatemore extension allows for namespaces, see

	http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-imap-annotatemore-17#section-3.2

so this would be defined as a private (and thus living in the user specific 
namespace) annotation that should be set by each user for any folder where 
they have read access (or more).

This should work according to specification, but the question is whether it is 
currently implemented in Cyrus, and how. Has someone tried this before? Is 
someone willing to help us test this to make sure it works?

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve
Chief Executive Officer

Kolab Systems AG
Zürich, Switzerland

e: greve at kolabsys.com
t: +41 78 904 43 33
w: http://kolabsys.com

pgp: 86574ACA Georg C. F. Greve
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