[Kolab-devel] [Kde-pim] State of Kontact Mail

[Del]

Just finished reading through the review. It seems they used the 4.7.0
version (which AFAIK is not default for OpenSuse 11.4), and even there
they bumped into more issues than I can remember from this summer. The
switch to Akonadi for Kmail had to be sooner or later, I am glad it
was sooner. It will have time to mature by the time we get RH7,
K/Ubuntu 12.04, the next Debian stable etc. The guys at Techradar
either has an agenda, or they do not have a clue. One thing is the
excess reference to strange bugs, but on a couple of occasions they
seem to be flat out dishonest (kontact is available for windows and
mac, on the "besides mail" part it should be pretty clear that Kontact
wins hands down).

As a Kontact fan for some years, and listening to numerous others
trying it out, I have a list of what I think is missing. Still, I
still firmly believe that Kontact objectively is the best groupware
client out there regardless of platform. My wish list for future
focus:
-Stabilisation and further performance improvement of akonadi and
nepomuk (I am thrilled to see how fast that has come along this fall).
-Better default choices (I believe a number of the default choices in
Kontact differs from the preferences of the majority), maybe a survey
could reveal this.
-Even simpler "add account wizard" (really love the work done already,
huge improvement over kde-pim wizards, this is actually the only part
where I agree with Techradar).
-Improved support for multiple calendars, in fact the whole gui needs
a work over. Outlook (or Thunderbird/Evolution for that matter) is
hardly much better at this, but that should not be the benchmark. For
companies with more than a few employees, juggling your colleague's
calendars (no, free/busy info is not sufficient) is a nightmare.
-Of course, a stable Windows and OSX client will also help increase the market.

I think we will see a healthy increase in Kontact adoption the coming
year. The most important stuff is already ironed out.

Thanks for all the great work!
Del


On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 10:39 PM, Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> wrote:
> Hi Thomas, Hi Andreas,
>
>> Am Mittwoch, 23. November 2011 schrieb Thomas Koch:
>> > http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-linux-email-
> client-5- reviewed-and-rated-1041236
>
> first thanks for sharing the article! It gives us a chance to react to it.
> Like Andreas I also thing the article is at least a bit strange in more than
> one way. Still you say:
>
>> > I'm sorry, but I can't say much positive about KMail either and am looking
>> > for a replacement since some time.
>
> The KDEPIM group embarked on an major redesign
> based on 10 years of experience with KMail, Kontact and Groupware.
> The reason was that we were hitting the limits of what could have been done
> with the old architecture.
>
> This redesign has not been completed, so during most of the KDE 4 Platform
> releases, there was no new KMail. Just this summer of 2011 the new KDEPIM
> design reached the important milestone to be the default choice for many KDE
> people. Those new versions have not yet reached many distributions, which is
> the next major milestone. Right now Kontact and all its frontends, like Mail,
> Calendar, Contacts and Notes are in Beta. They work, but they are unoptimised.
> The developers use it for their production systems for many, many months.
> Yes, it is slow, yes it still has some defects and its packaging is missing
> experience as well. But the potential of the new architecture and codebase
> goes way beyond the old stuff.
>
> Right now someshould should keep in mind:
> Most distributions still package some versions that are inbetween, they are
> based on KDE Plattform 4, but they in the middle of this refactoring. And most
> distributions do not quality control in detail what they are shipping. You
> know that KDE embarked on the platform 4 move, which also included refactoring
> and redesigning a lot of the platform, the desktop and many applications. The
> idea was that somebody can still run the old KDE 3 Platform based applications
> until the new ones surpass them in quality.
>
> On Thursday 24 November 2011 17:48:55 Andreas Gungl wrote:
>> Like many others I'm disappointed from KMail in KDE 4. All that Akonadi
>> stuff might be technically interesting, but as long as things don't work as
>> stable and fast as KMail in KDE 3, I wouldn't give it more credit than
>> Thunderbird.
>
> If you want to check out Kontact Mail (the new design) you should do it for
> seeing the potential or for helping to improve it.
> If you want a stable Kolab Client or just a nice Email and PIM application,
> use a stable Kontact E35 based on the KDE 3 Plattform.
> It nicely integrated with the new Plasma Desktops based on KDE Plattform 4.
> Kontact Enterprise35 has been continously maintained and improved,
> it is mature with lots of enterprise production experience.
>
>> Nevertheless the review is somehow strange. Take the Security section:
>>       "None of the tools let you create keys from the interface itself,
>>       except for KMail, which can create keys when defining your
> identity."
>> And then: KMail - 0/5
>> That's all but serious!
>
> As was pointed out on kde-pim, it is unclear which version they have tried,
> whether it the Kontact Mail coming with 4.7.3 or 4.7.0. This makes a huge
> difference. Master is even a lot better. It is also unclear how they have
> counted the score, some things seem to have been minor defects either in the
> product or the packaging. They did not know about the cross platform nature of
> Kontact. There are already beta packages for MS Windows, there is a Touch
> interface, some devs use the Mac version for production since more than a
> year.
>
> Anyway, the article clearly shows the new Kontact needs to be improved
> and optimised. And it will be done, because since July a lot more devs see the
> potential and give us a hand. The hard groundwork has been done now
> and now we need to shape a fine application from the rough gem!
>
> Best Regards,
> Bernhard
>
>
> --
> Send with http://userbase.kde.org/Kontact_Touch from an ideapad running MeeGo
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