[Kolab-devel] On the road to Kolab 3.0

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Hi all,

As you may have seen from the news, there is now a new web client for the 
Kolab Server, based upon the popular Roundcube Webmailer. The new client 
supports email, address book and calendar, a KEP 14 compliant sieve editor and 
has a nice user interface to configure mobile phone synchronization. 

You can see some screen shots in the media release:

	http://kolabsys.com/index.php/resources/123-08-december-2011-

The new web client has been developed in a sprint with and for a customer we 
cannot name, but all code has been up-streamed (giving the world the upcoming 
0.7 release of Roundcube) or will be provided through our git repositories 
where Roundcube itself did not want to host the code, as it went beyond what 
the Roundcube core wants to provide, or was too Kolab specific.

Naturally we're sure that many of you want to get your hands on this 
technology and play with it - in particular as Roundcube has a very easy to 
extend modular design and allows all sorts of plug-ins. So there is a lot of 
potential for extension and customization here.

Due to the shortcomings of OpenPKG there is simply no way we can provide this 
on OpenPKG, however, so we've been working on a KVM image that can be run 
against a 2.3.* Kolab Server which Jeroen should provide an update for in the 
next days.

The work was furthermore  done on an experimental 2.4 branch which includes 
some cleanup of LDAP idiosyncrasies, so the old web admin will no longer work 
against this. As it does not seem sensible to re-implement a static web admin, 
we have begun developing a configuration API for the server against which the 
new web admin and other administration tools can work.

You can find some of the work in progress at:

	http://wiki.kolab.org/User:Bruederli/Draft:Kolab_Webadmin_API

Once this provides a basic functional level, we intend to push this out as 
packages for a 3.0-development branch that should be installable and deliver a 
somewhat working system, but is not intended for production or even serious 
personal use.

That will also be the starting point for the development towards Kolab 3.0, 
because we're now at the stage where it is no longer possible to address some 
of the issues in a purely non-breaking incremental fashion.

For that, quite some more things are planned, from the format adaptations that 
have been discussed and partially already agreed upon on kolab-format@, to 
more exciting things like Server Side Akonadi. You can find some of the 
conceptual thinking on this last point here:

	http://wiki.kolab.org/User:Greve/ServerSideAkonadi

There is a bit more, and we are planning to provide a full roadmap, but we 
would already very much like to invite you to participate in the next 
development cycle.

We'll be exchanging some of the "goldie but oldie" components against 
technologies that are more modern, modular, and extensible, so there will be 
plenty of opportunity for you to participate in various stages of the process.

For those who wish to contribute we can provide virtual machines to experiment 
on, as well as automated builds an so on, and we would very much like you to 
let us know what else you might find useful in order to get involved.

We plan to use this cycle to try and work with the KEP describing the 
development and release process which you can find detailed at

http://wiki.kolab.org/User:Kanarip/Draft:Development_and_Release_Process

so if you want to propose features as per that process guideline, please go 
ahead. The release of Kolab 3.0 would then take place around May/June 2012.

So, lots of exciting things ahead. We hope you'll be part of that. :)

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