personal opinion.....

[Andreas Gungl]

On Sunday 30 October 2005 02:10, Joe Auty wrote:
> On Oct 29, 2005, at 6:55 PM, Andreas Gungl wrote:
> > When we evaluated groupware solutions for our company, one
> > important issue was
> > offline capability. Consider travelling w/o paying for online
> > connections
> > only because you want to use the time in the train/plain to read
> > and sort
> > messages and manage calendars or prepare some messages for sending.
> >
> > All the nice web solutions fail badly in this respect. I like
> > eGroupware, but
> > it would not fit our needs in the company. And that's why I say one
> > should be
> > very carefull with simple comparisons between groupware solutions.
>
> Sorry to digress, but I'm extremely intrigued by what you mean by
> "offline capability". How does this work? Are there email clients
> that will track offline changes, and sync them up once the user goes
> back online? What clients will do this? I suspect Kontact is one?

By "offline capability" I meant synchronizing your IMAP account with the Kolab 
server (which automatically sync's your calendar and addressbook due to the 
IMAP storage).
Now you can pull the cable and go or travel with your notebook where you like 
to be. You can write new messages and queue them (sending does of course not 
work in that moment), you can move, copy or delete messages. Back to the 
place where your cable (or WLAN) is, you plug the cable and synchronize your 
account again. New messages are transfered to your notebook while the changes 
you've made are transfered to the server.

To give a nearly objective view: There are bug reports about problems in 
Kontact/KMail, but I've been using it for more than two years in connection 
with a Kolab server and I've never lost messages. I even use it from two 
machines. I only care to not sync' them in the very same moment, but that 
doesn't make sense in a normal workflow anyway.

An alternative solution is Outlook plus a plugin (from Toltec or Konsec). 
We're using the Toltec connector in our company too. There's nothing to 
complain about it.

Regards,
Andreas