Kolab & SyncML status

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi Adrian,

Adrian von Bidder <avbidder at fortytwo.ch> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking to replace an ageing OX installation by a new groupware product, 
> mainly because we have qutie a few problems with SyncML devices and bugs 
> related to repeating calendar events.  Also, the user interface has some 
> quirks that are not very userfriendly, and the future development of OX is 
> not clear to us.
>
> So maybe Kolab + Horde might be a viable contender - perhaps some people 
> want to voice an opinion here?
>
> The main question is how reliable is SyncML support (we'd need syncml on the 
> server side, as we'll mostly be using the web frontend and people are used 
> to sync via GPRS), the SyncML devices mainly are some Treo 680 and some 
> Nokia E61.  I found some not very recent mailing list postings indicating 
> that it might still be shaky, but I haven't followed recent development.

Not reliable at all and completely untested. At least to my knowledge.

The Kolab server by itself currently has no support for SyncML. Horde
on the other side has. I even believe that it is already quite good
though it probably also still has some bugs. They had few reports in
there bug tracker concerning SyncML lately.

In the combination of Kolab + Horde SyncML has currently one major
problem: It uses two indermediate layers between the groupware objects
and the SyncML API that are dependant on a MySQL db. On a pure Kolab
server this is not an option because the Kolab server has always made
a point of not using an SQL database but rather using IMAP as storage.

If you are willing to configure an external MySQL db for your Kolab
server and use it with Horde (this is actually not too complex) you
might get SyncML to work.

At least this has worked for me in a test setup. Bu there will still
be Kolab specific bugs. And all I have done were no real world tests.

To me this is also a high priority feature and I expect it to be made
available soon. There are no guarantees at the current time though and
if you need it for customers I'd be cautious.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> (Without wanting to start a my-dick-is-bigger flamewar: I have looked at 
> eGroupWare's web frontend and have quite liked it, but with the recent 
> disagreements between the egw main developers that may lead to a fork of 
> the project, I'm not sure if this would be a good decision.  So now I'm 
> looking for other projects.  If people have opinions on other groupware 
> products, too, I'm happy to receive them, probably better off list, 
> though.)
>
> cheers
> -- vbi
>
>
>
>
> -- 
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p at rdus Kolab work is funded in part by KDAB and the Kolab Konsortium

____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _
E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
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