Q: Kolab and Mac OS X?

[Del]

Hello Albrecht,

I did quite a bit of testing on Macs this spring. Among other things I
did quite exhaustive testing on the Kontact version Till packed. I am
happy to hear that Kontact has matured, as my meeting with Macports
was quite unpleasant in that respect, and the packaged version was too
immature (but really minor stuff, so I am not surprised if it is
mature now). You can alternatively consider using Fink, which provides
the more familiar apt tool for package installation. Both Fink and
Macports are unfortunately source based package systems, and building
packages from source requires that you have the xcode developer
package installed, and an awful amount of patience. I am not sure
about Macports, but for Fink you can find a number of binary packages
available through third party repositories. If you plan do do any kind
of roll-out on Macs, I am afraid you will need to package it yourself,
it is simply too time consuming to compile.

Kontact is called kdepim, so you will find it under that package name
in both Fink and Macports.

Make sure your Macs are up-to-date, otherwise you are in for a rocky
ride. Also make sure all are at least Leopard, Tiger is as far as I
learned a no-go.

Not sure I fancy the mail infrastructure from Apple, but a well
functioning plug-in for Thunderbird would be very nice. There is one,
and I tried to update the Kolab wiki with information on it. It is
stable from what testing I did, but unfortunately leave quite a bit to
be desired on the functionality side. Manual syncing of calendar
events, where all events are synced each time (making it increasingly
slow to sync as the number of events increase) is simply not a viable
approach.

I believe the best approach for syncing mobiles is to sync with the
server. Syncml is provided by Horde, and it seems like good work is
put into maturing that implementation in the coming Kolab releases
(thanks Gunnar!). All smartphones should in principle support Syncml,
either directly (like all the more open players do), or through the
Funambol plug-in (with the proprietary crew iphone, winmobile and
blackberry). Do not expect it to be mature yet though.

With some luck we may be able to use Kontact directly on mobiles soon.
Nokia N900 looks like the hottest candidate.

Good luck, and keep us informed on your progress,
Del