annoying Kolab things

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Marco,

On Tuesday 20 March 2007 16:52, Marco wrote:
> It's the 3th time I give Kolab it's try and it's the 3th time I'm getting
> annoyed and going to give up!

sorry to hear this. Unfortunately reasonaly setting up 
an email/groupware solution is rather complex, though some vendors claim 
differently, if you get down to a practical setup it usually is not easy.

> But before I do this I want to let you know what I think:

Thanks for your feedback.
I have some comments which help to explain why things are like they are.

> - Mailinglist
> 	As I think, today Mailinglists are obsolete because of these reasons:
> 	1. 	Today the biggest part of all email traffic is spam. Therefor many
> ISP's have installed own Spamfilters. Because of this you can't tell if a
> mail sent to a mailing list will arrive to every member.

Yes, it got more unreliably, still it works fairly well.
Any member has a chance to check the archive and ask again if they really
feel like the email did not go through. We do have some moderators
for the public kolab lists and they keep a lot of spam off the list while
still letting some posts throuhg, which get haltet for inspection.

Note that the forum we have had, we need to close because of the spam
and we did not find enough moderators for it.

> 	In my opinion a web forum would be a much bether solution.

We have tried this, and we will open one again if there are enough people
that would particiate in this and help to run and moderate it. This is a 
considerable effort.

Note that we do have a wiki and a lot of reference information
gets added in there.

> - Documentation
> 	I think it would be much easier to setup and work with Kolab if there
> would be one document which explains everything. From the Basic setup of
> the Server and the Clients 'til the "special features" like group folders
> and stuff....

We have tried to do this, but "everything" would make the documentation so 
big, that in fact you would not find what you need either, so there is no
golden solution to the size problem of the documentation.
The Kolab-Konsortium team plans to overhaul the server documentation in the 
near future. Help is always appreciated of course.

> 	At this point let me highlight that (at least in my experience) there is a
> 	mistake in the Documentation. The Outlook 2003 Document says I should
> 	create a new POP3 account. As I see, this is wrong. Since if I do so I
> can't select this account in the Toltec connector....

The document is correct in that a POP3 account need to be created
within Outlook. If you find out what missled you to think this would be
within Toltec, please create an issue in your tracker with a detailed 
description.


> 	Another point is the order. The Outlook 2003 Document First explains the
> 	creation of the new email account and then things like Free/Busy,
> Delegation working in groups and so on.... The Configuration of the Toltec
> connector is explained at the end of the section....

This is of course debatable. I usually actually do configure the email account 
things first, because if this does not work, you would not need to progress
with the more involved funcations. Also you can be sure that Toltec is not
involved in the problems you are seeing.

> 	I would really like to participate and write a better Documentation but to
> do this, I need to look through the whole stuff. And at the moment I'm
> giving up the 3th time to configuring Kolab.

This is one reason we are offering professional services for Kolab Server,
those things just take time, even when they are documented properly.

> I'm fearing the day on which I have to Migrate my server hardware and
> therefor caring the data from the old server to the new one...... Nightmare

It just needs careful planning, I guess.

Bernhard


-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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