kolabd package available in Debian sid

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Markus,

Am Samstag, 8. April 2006 00:40 schrieb Markus Heller:
> Instead we must look forward and see where we have deficits: It is really
> vital to get kolab into the main distributions, and we'll only reach this
> if we get rid of openpkg. 

I disagree.
It is much more important to offer stable features and good support.
Both can be done much easier currently with OpenPKG.

> SuSE/Novell will never include something in their 
> distro which doesn't fit into the FHS. And the others won't either.

It is only a small drawback as Kolab Server can easily be depolyed on
such systems already, because of the OpenPKG layer.
And this is much easier on development, support and system administration
(for a Kolab solution).

The Kolab client though should be in distributions for the desktop and is 
ready for it. It seems that most distributors, except Mandriva are not really 
interested. 

> Another development goal must be modularity. We need to focus the business
> perspective: 

The above opinion includes my business experience with Kolab. :-)

> Here ar relix we see that with shared folders, Kolab actually 
> makes up a rather good crm infrastructure. But to be really good, it takes
> more. Having hundreds of shared folders and navigating in a huge tree is a
> little annoying. There should be a crm tool on basis of kolab, perhaps as a
> kpart in Kontact.

Adding CRM features would be a major design step and wanted by users, I agree.
However Richard is right on target: Somebody needs to finance this.
Our community would need to grow much larger before we actually can do this.
And I am counting the commercial part towards the community.
Currently, the largest part of Kolab maintenance is payed by customers of the 
Kolab-Konsortium. Next there are Richard Bos and Marcus Hüwe.

> Some more: Horde should be really reliably integrated in kolab. No
> frickling around to get it runnig! One click in a graphical install tool
> and that's it! 

The estimation of many developers is that Horde is probably very hard to fix
because of design problems. Fixing Horde or using different components
will be a lot of work.

> The web frontend must become an easy to configure portal framework. It must
> be easy to turn kolab into a communication platform for societies. Have a
> look at the extension concept of typo3! Figure out, you can just download
> web extensions through a web backend, and they install upon a click. In
> typo3, it's similar to apt on Debian.

Kolab Server is quite modular so far.
It would be nice to integrate it with more services (that already can be run 
on such a server).

> Let's look beyond the horizon: M$ are integrating Sharepoint Portal Server
> and Exchange. And they're adapting their entire Office Suite framework to
> collaborate with this conglomerate.
>
> They're just about to create another big monopoly, and I really don't want
> to stay back.

We are trying hard to make visions come reality.
Give us a fraction of the budget and we can reassue you: 
We could do a lot. 
Unfortunately we do not have it. So we need to make may smaller customers
happy and try to build a business chain around Kolab.

-- 
www.kolab-konsortium.com  Professional Maintenance, Consultancy and Support.