Question about Kolab XML Format

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Gustavo,

On Wednesday 13 October 2004 04:53, Gustavo Michels wrote:
> First of all sorry if this is the wrong list to post, I was in doubt if I
> should ask questions on the development list.

Yes you can ask questions on the development list,
but it is also fine to ask here.

> Anyway, on to the subject. I am currently in the middle of a university
> project which, in part, should migrate an Exchange server to an opensource
> solution. I chose Kolab to be the solution.
>
> I was doing mail & calendar data migration simply by directly copying each
> user's mailbox mail and calendar folders from exchange's imap server to
> kolab's imap server, by using a perl script called imapsync (available at
> freshmeat).

This brings me to the question: What clients are connected
to the Exchange server?
It always was my understanding that Outlook clients
do not save calendar data as iCalendar in files.

> Now, upgrading to the latest kolab packages using obmtool.conf from cvs,
> the new Kolab XML format was enabled, and Kontact no longer understands the
> iCal format and silently ignores my existing iCal events, even if I set the
> storage format as iCal/vCard.

That might simply be a bug, if you choose to only work
with iCalendar/vCard (Kolab1 storage format) which means
you cannot interact with other and more modern clients
and basically stay with Kontact, this legacy support should work.
(Note that Kontact is software under development.)

> My question: is there a tool to convert iCal to the XML format Kolab now
> uses? Also, converting vCard to the XML format will also be needed, since I
> was planning on converting Outlook Contacts to vCards and just upload them
> to the imap server.

You should be able to use a Kontact in Kolab1 mode
and then save the data to your local disc; switch to Kolab2 storage
and then import them into Kontact from disc.
Importing is the way to get iCalendard and VCards into Kontact.

> If there isn't such a tool, I will probably have to create one. Where can I
> find information about the Kolab XML format, and most important, do you
> think it is fairly easy to create one?

There is a draft snapshot of the format spec in the Documentation
section of www.kolab.org. This is under development and the discussion
happens on the kolab-format list. The latest draft is always 
accessible in public CVS.

As I wrote above, using KDE technology it should be quite easy to write
a translator. (Note that such a mapping will not perfect, which is one
of the reason we went to the new storage format.)

Bernhard
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