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German Government Commissions KDE Groupware System

Posted by timothy on from the paid-to-scratch-itches dept.

tankengine writes "The German government has ordered a full-blown open-source groupware solution for KDE, to be delivered by the end of this year. It will consist of a server made of standard OSS components (Apache, Postfix, LDAP, etc) called Kolab, and a KDE client. The contractors are aiming for functional equivalence to MS Exchange and Outlook 2000."

6 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. reinventing the wheel? by mgkimsal2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My first reaction what that they're reinventing the wheel. Then I saw that they're going to be using and extending many current KDE components. *IF* the KDE teams takes these changes/modifications and uses them to build a new base, great. If, however, this becomes essentially a fork of current Kmail, Korganizer, etc., I don't see this as a good thing.

    And yeah, why not take Aethera and build on that - it's already more integrated with itself and other things, and I'm sure the Kompany could have used a nice gov't contract just as much as the team that got it (maybe moreso).

    --
    creation science book
    1. Re:reinventing the wheel? by LMCBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not to worry.

      If you read the post on kde-core-devel, it's going to be a separate CVS branch (still on KDE CVS), but only temporarily and only because the project needs to be finished on a very short timescale. Basically, they don't want to make big changes to the HEAD branch so close to the release of KDE 3.1. Once kroupware(*) is done, they will port the changes back into HEAD.

      here is the relevant post to kde-core-devel.

      [* is anyone suprised by the name? :) ]

      --
      Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
  2. What does it mean? by f00zbll · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's good news and all, but what does this really mean? I'm talking about open vs closed source. I'm talking about cultural changes. The open vs close is part of it, but there's a larger issue here. Has computing technology reached the point where it is an utility and is maturing towards that end?

    Look at the history of cars and paved roads for example. Once there was enough cars on the road, the need for well paved roads became a public utility. Same is true for gas, water and electricity. Once it starts going that way, people's tolerance for non-standard ways becomes a huge issue.

    then again, I could be smoking crack and this is just more PR bs.

  3. The Mozilla project should do this by ceswiedler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've been thinking that the Mozilla project should do something like this. They have the resources to handle an Exchange replacement. Imagine "Mozilla Server" which is a single-install replacement for Exchange/IIS; it uses existing OSS components like Apache but ties them together and simplifies configuration. The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.

    Of course since the source and the standards are both open, many other clients would be able to access the data as well. But I think Mozilla/Netscape is enough of a force in the OSS world to set the standard for a project like this. I'm not sure KDE is.

    1. Re:The Mozilla project should do this by reaper20 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The Mozilla project is doing something similar to this. Check out the Mozilla Calendar project, which uses iCal calendars (yes, the same format as the Mac calendar) - you can load the calendar on any server and access either through ftp or webdav.

      Combined with Roaming Profiles (getting worked on) - the Calendar, Mail/News using LDAP/IMAP, and Mozilla, will offer a very powerful, OPEN solution for groupware. Add all this up, and you can have the same bookmarks, cookies, prefs, calendar, and contact list hosted on a server, that you can access from your local copy of Mozilla.

  4. Re:Planned for Outlook itself to connect? by Telastyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As others have mentioned, the Bynari connector will be needed for windows access. This sucks. I mean seriously. Bynari is bad enough that nearly nobody is using even now to do groupware, HENCE THE DAMNED PROJECT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

    I would much rather just have a seperate application, nearly exactly like the KDE client, ported to windows. It will/would hopefully have an outlook importer (not hard, I can offer services in that regard), but it should not be outlook. If it looks and acts just like the KDE version, then it'll be much easier to move users over to *nix after they've used it elsewhere.