Looking for input from Kontact users

[Andre Heinecke]

Hi,

I'm a bit biased here in my opinion as I am working with Kontact for Windows 
but I want to comment some things said here. You have valid concerns and this 
is a remarkably objective thread about problems with Kontact :)
Apologies for not responding inline because of the length of this mail 
already.

First I would disagree here that Kontact is far from being stable, Kontact is 
in a pretty good shape currently bugs get fixed the "Community Q/A" is 
working (by which i mean bugs get reported / triaged / fixed in good time) 
and following it from 4.5 to 4.8 it made so much Progress that i am really 
optimistic that it won't take long to reach most people's definition of 
stable.

As for your issues with multiuser / Virtuoso etc. there is much to be done 
with configuration. MySQL is just the default akonadi database backend, you 
could use PostgreSQL, or even sqlite if you want. All have their advantages 
disadvantages but if you run a dedicated setup for a company you might want 
to customize there and not just take the default.

Akonadi was not designed for single user desktops. The configuration just 
defaults to settings for that.

Same goes for Virtuoso, you probably don't want full file indexing running 
over NFS :) So you need to disable it. And if your users already lived 
without full text search with e.3.5 then they might find it acceptable that 
full text search is turned of system wide before it has ripened a bit more. 
(And that does hugely increase performance overall)

I won't say Kontact is ready for "Out of the Box deployment", just taking the 
Packages from your distribution, but I also don't think it will ever be 
there. There is too much variation in system Installations / Configurations, 
Institutional setups and so on that a one size fits all perfectly 
configuration of such a complex thing as a Groupware Client with Kontact's 
featureset is not really possible.

The Support offers for Kontact (from kolabsys for example) are not scam, they 
are not trying to make you pay for what you can also get for free. Setting up 
a good Groupware solution (client and server) takes knowledge and experience 
and if you want a professional setup you can either invest a lot of time and 
pain to try to figure it out yourself or pay someone to give you that 
support. (Same goes for Q/A bugfixing etc.)


Regards,
Andre

Am Montag 06 Februar 2012 10:56:16 schrieb ITSEF Admin:
> On Thursday 15 December 2011 11:38:15 Alvin wrote:
> > On Thursday 08 December 2011 15:58:37 ITSEF Admin wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > - What version of Kontact are you using (e35, "the one that came with
> > > the distribution", ...)?
> >
> > Kontact 4.7.4 (The one that comes with Kubuntu 11.10 + PPA)
>
> Right, that's the one we're running a one-user pilot with right now.
>
> > > - On which platform and with how many users?
> >
> > Only myself. For testing. Other users in the company are using our older
> > mail server with Kontact, Thunderbird or Outlook. Only for mail. Kontact
> > users have the version that came with Kubuntu 10.04, but are requesting a
> > change to Thunderbird due to stability issues.
>
> That is consistent with what we saw - Kontact is far from being stable...
> :-(
> [...]
>
> > > - What are your experiences with Kontact with regard to
> > >   * stability (crashes...)
> > >   * reliability (lost mail, lost appointments, ....)
> > >   * overall "good behaviour"
> >
> > - When sending mail, plasma often crashes.
> > - Some mails can't be marked as read.
> > - Loading a message can take several minutes. I just clicked a plain text
> > message that is already downloaded. The preview pane says "Retrieving
> > Folder Contents" Please wait... In a few minutes, I'll be able to read
> > the mail. - Checking an DIMAP folder for the first time after startup of
> > Kontact often takes a long time.

>
> Yes, we've seen those as well at times, but with e35 on Kubuntu 10.04. So
> far, the KDE4/Kubuntu 11.10 version seems to fate a little bit better.
>
> > - Nepomuk/virtuoso eats my memory. It's better now, but the first time I
> > received mail from the server the machine needed 2 days and nights to
> > calm down.
>
> That is one of my concerns as well. This could be seen on both our pilot
> machine and on my machine at home where I was experimenting with Kontact as
> well.
>
> > - I no longer use the "Find Messages". The load on the system is just too
> > high.
>
> That has been the case with Kontact as long as we've been using it - one of
> the most frequent complaints of our users.
>
> [... rest of list with flakey behaviour skipped ...]
>
> > So, not very 'production ready'. It's a shame. KMail has every function I
> > have come to expect from a mail client. I loved KMail in KDE3 and I find
> > Akonadi a fantastic idea. If only it weren's so buggy. Increase the
> > performance, take out the bugs and you have a gem.
>
> Hmpf, that all sounds not very confidence inspiring... Akonadi seems to be
> the one element to start with that is apparently far from production ready
> - there is a whole list of potential issues that make me wonder whether we
> should even consider seriously trying it:
> - Akonadi doesn't start up on NFS-mounted home directories unless a
> workaround is applied - that's an (K)Ubuntu/AppArmomr problem
> (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/akonadi/+bug/913589)
> - Akonadi is fragile on NFS-mounted home directories: KDE bug 275261,
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275261)
> - Akonadi seems to be limited to stand-alone single-user machines by
> initial design - at least that's the impression I get when I look at the
> following excerpt from KDE's own "Deployment Issues" list
> (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Deployment_issues):
>     * Multiple access: Should multiple Akonadi instances' mysqlds access a
> single set of data files the mysql will likely corrupt the data. This can
> happen in any NFS+YP installation where users can log onto any machine and
> access shared homes. MySQL relies on filesystem locking to prevent multiple
> access. ["MySQL multiple instance docu" given as reference, Oracle has
> moved everything around - should be this:
> http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/mysql-refman-6.0/server-administration.
>html] * InnoDB tables should not be used on NFS. [Again, Oracle had moved
> things - seems to be linked to this:
> http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/mysql-refman-6.0/storage-engines.html#i
>nnodb-restrictions] * NFS speed: MySQL documentation recommends against
> locating its data files on network shares.
> [...]
>     * Backup: MySQL data files should not be backed up without telling the
> mysqld process, otherwise a corrupt backup will be made. LOCK TABLES and
> FLUSH TABLES at the least. A dump can be made or mysqlhotbackup may be used
> in some circumstances. We should consider sysadmins' backup techniques when
> planning/promoting Akonadi, as a simple rsync cronjob with running Akonadi
> will not work. MySQL backup advice. [this point does not matter much to us,
> fortunately, but I see it as a severe restriction, as it makes backup more
> difficult]
>
> More than enough to cast doubt on whether newer Kontact versions using
> Akonadi are a good idea when used in a multi-user, NFS-based environment.
> At the very least, we'd probably have to investigate whether it is possible
> to use a central MySQL server for Akonadi - the idea of every user having
> to run his/her own MySQL-server instance seems somewhat crazy to me...
> Nonetheless, if anybody out there has some additional insight, I'd be much
> obliged.
>
> Cheerio,
>
> Thomas
>
> P.S. (as it is rather OT on this list):
> > We're in the process of evaluating a new mail server for the company. I
> > use Kolab personally, but for the company, Kolab was ruled out due to
> > difficulty of installation/upgrade and missing documentation. Also, most
> > people are using a recent version of Thunderbird now.
>
> Maybe you'd like to share (off-list) what you're looking at right now?


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Andre Heinecke |  ++49-541-335083-262 |  http://www.intevation.de/
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