[Kolab-devel] kolab and real-time communication (chat, etc)

[Aaron Seigo]

On 21.11.2016 18:29, Mihai Badici wrote:
> I can understood this point of view, however it is not very clear for 
> me what
> do you mean by "integrated feature in kolab?"

The ability to use real time communication easily and appropriately from 
any other application.

Examples:

  * providing a clean way to pub/sub alerts, such as when you receive 
that important email you've been waiting for
  * being able to record meeting metadata (who/when) in the audit trail 
system (required for some regulated industries)
  * selective recording of histories and recall into other tools
  * ability to create ad-hoc chats in the collaborative document editing 
window for the participants
  * ability for calendar events scheduled as online meetings to spawn and 
manage the chats
  * recording of meeting minutes as part of the "meeting room" 
experience, which then can feed directly into meeting notebooks (as in: 
a notebook in the Notes data in Kolab; so rather than 
summarize-copy-paste one can keep meeting notes "live" during the chat 
and have them automagically filed for you for later)

This all needs to work just as nicely from web, mobile and desktop 
systems as well.

> From my point of view, kolab is
> pretty modular, and i think it is better to stay modular.

What benefits do you see from being able to swap out the chat system?

> At first view, i see
> only two point of connection of jabber to kolab: first it is LDAP ( 
> ejabberd
> support is pretty week indeed here) and Roundcube.

That's true if one sees chat as another feature used in isolation.

An alternate view is that real time communication is best used to 
augment existing features and workflows.

For the first way of looking at it, I would agree with you. But the 
latter requires both more performance from the chat system as well an 
extremely strong story in terms of flexibility and integration 
opportunities.

> If you want to integrate
> some part in a fat client, we need to change the fat client. ( I like 
> fat

Not when we have XMPP support. That's the big reason for wanting XMPP on 
top.

> jitsi who has a full stack for audio/video for chat.

jitsi is a non-starter for Kolab for technical reasons.

> I'm a little afraid you try to rewrite Exchange.

Don't worry, we're not. We're trying to write Kolab ;)

> There were in the past tons
> of fully integrated web based collaborative solution, i don't remember 
> none of
> them.

We aren't focused on web as the only mechanism.

> I'm interested in kolab precisely because it is standard, modular and
> use well tested components.

Keep in mind that the core of the real-time communication (aka "chat", 
but really quite a bit more than that) is based on a proven existing 
tool (Phoenix pub/sub), and that having XMPP is a requirement for us 
since we need to keep the "standards" train going.

But we have yet to find something that will allow us to build a 
compelling solution that already exists right "out of the box".

> It has a nice webmail but works alo with Outlook,
> works with ActiveSync but also with a simple imap client and so on. If 
> you are

.. and none of that will change.

For chat, you'll get to use Jabber clients and standard web browsers for 
video (WebRTC), and we'll have support in Kube for the more advanced 
bits.

Hope that makes it a bit clearer?

-- 
Aaron Seigo