[Kolab-devel] some toughts regarding owncloud integration

[Mihai Badici]

There is some time I didn't play with kolab modules but since I had the
opportunity to add an owncloud ( in fact nextcloud but is mostly the
same) to a customer who use since longtime my customized version of
kolab, I spent some time to try a basic integration.

I think we can have lot of arguments pro and cons to integrate files in
the mail server. My personal opinion is  the file management is too
specific and too complex to be simply an add-on to the mail system (
like contacts or calendar) . Even Microsoft tried that in Exchange 2003
and abandoned this approach in the next version, and even i don't take
their server as an ideal, I'm sure they spent a lot of time trying to
made this part work.

So ( again, in my opinion) the document management should be a totally
separate application, as, for example, owncloud. ( now It's their job to
made a document editor :) )

Consequently, I think the main integration needed should be the ability
to attach folders from cloud - this can be managed using chwala - and on
the other side, will be nice to allow owncloud to access the user
contacts to allow them to easy send links. I didn't found a plugin to
access an external address book ( I didn't search too much anyway,
probably we can access iRony )

Ok, back to owncloud, I configured in chwala the required settings and
after struggling a little with sabre-dav libraries the folder I
configured appeared in webmail.

I still have two issues I need to investigate:

1. The root folder content isn't listed: I can see the folders and the
files inside them but the files in the root directory of owncloud aren't
listed.

2. There is an issue attaching specific type files: .doc, .odt, , .pdf
aren't sent ( in fact are sent as empty files; I will investigate that
in the future)