Looking for input from Kontact users

[ITSEF Admin]

On Monday 6 February 2012 19:09:16 Andre Heinecke wrote:
[...]
> 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)
[...]

Ok, I want to be fair here: Our experiences with Kontact were all e35, i.e. 
Kontact 3.5.x as maintained by Kolab. With those versions, stability in terms 
of crashes was abysimal in the beginning, but improved quite a bit over time. 
However, I would still not describe it as "stable" - there are just too many 
reports of the type "Kontact crashed on me again" coming in from our users. 
Based on this, our expectations for Kontact 4.x are very low - it will have 
to prove itself. The bigger problem, however, is reliability in terms of "how 
often can I not properly access my mail" - which is what I described in my 
original mail. Granted, that part seems to have worsened since we're running 
KDE4 as platform underneath e35, but it was never good in our experience. I'm 
already happy that we're no longer randomly losing appointments in the 
calendars - this problem was so bad that many of our users still do not trust 
the groupware part to this day. Again, it will be an uphill battle for 
Kontact 4.x to overcome those reservations.

[...]
> 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.

From what I've seen in the docs, I definitely do *not* want to use sqlite - 
the warnings of its shortcomings were pretty clear, 
thank-you-very-much... :-}


> 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.

I can live with that - still amazes me, though, how much work is needed to 
make Kontact play nice with a pretty standard set-up...


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

...and that's the first thing I see, of course... :-} Nonetheless, a central 
SQL server is definitely something we will look into - anything to the whole 
thing as stable and simple as possible... I've put that on the "things to 
research for the pilot" list. The only thing is: That list is getting longer 
and longer - it's just a matter of time before someone will suggest 
Windows+Outlook as the solution, I'm afraid... <sigh>


> 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)

Performance is of the essence, so thank you for that hint!


[...]
> 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.)

Yes, I do believe that - but given the track-record of Kontact in our company 
so far, it would difficult for me to suggest spending money on support for 
something that is "so obviously broken" (in the user's experience, anyway). 
Hence the pilot - there will need to be some light at the end of the tunnel 
before a decision will be taken for Kontact (and thus Kolab).

Nonetheless, thank you kindly for sharing your insights, much appreciated!

Cheerio,

Thomas
-- 
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           Thomas Ribbrock, Team Leader IT-Team	|   brightsight
           itsef-admin at brightsight.com			|   Delftechpark 1
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