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Corporate KDE

Posted by michael on from the tired-of-outlook-viruses dept.

roomisigloomis writes "This article at CNET shows some headway being made in KDE development with aims at the corporate desktop. It's cool that it's funded by the German government."

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Reposted from dot.kde.org by manyoso · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ingo Klöcker says,

    Hi everybody!

    The C|Net article claims that "the first elements [of Kroupware] have appeared in the new KDE 3.1"[1]. That's (unfortunately) wrong. As you can check yourself cvs was "frozen for feature commits that are not listed in the planned-feature document"[2] on July 1, 2002 while the Kroupware "project began in September."[1]. So it wasn't possible to include anything from the Kroupware project in KDE 3.1.

    In particular the article claims:
    "Two elements of the client work are in the new KDE 3.1, released Tuesday: the KMail software can handle encrypted e-mail attachments, and the KOrganizer calendar software can communicate with Exchange 2000 servers."

    Both elements are not part of the Kroupware project.
    The KMail improvements, i.e. support for PGP/MIME (RFC 3156) and S/MIME, were made by the Ägypten project[3] (which incidentally also was ordered by Germany's agency for information technology security).
    The KOrganizer plugin[4] for connections to Microsoft Exchange 2000® servers was written by Jan-Pascal van Best completely independant of the Kroupware project.

    Anyway, you can all look forward to KDE 3.2 which will include most (if not all) of the client side elements of the Kroupware project.

    Regards,
    Ingo

    [1] http://news.com.com/2100-1001-982816.html
    [2] http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde- 3.1-release-plan.html
    [3] http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/index.html
    [4] http://korganizer.kde.org/workshops/ExchangePlugin /en/html/index.html

  2. aethera by minus_273 · · Score: 5, Informative

    heh they forgot aetherea
    which looks like a nice outlook clone

    --
    The war with islam is a war on the beast
    The war on terror is a war for peace
  3. The KDE-Germany Connection by Amadablam · · Score: 5, Informative

    For a little insight on the KDE-Germany connection, here's a snippet from http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde/README, a readme by Ralf Nolden, one of the people responsible for building KDE for debian:

    The main reason to set up this repository is, amongst others, that I'm working at credativ GmbH, located in Juelich, Germany since September 2002. We are contracted to set up KDE 3.1 together with the Aegypten project (http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/) on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody) by the BSI (Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik), the german governmental agency for security in IT-technology. The Aegypten project itself is a development effort contracted by the BSI to enable governmental authorities to use S/MIME certifications for email communications with KMail and Mutt as email clients. The graphical user interface for Desktop use is the primary goal behind the project. The same is valid for the Kroupware (http://www.kroupware.org) project, wich implements a groupware solution for KDE with two components, the kolab server as the group-ware server component and KMail, KAddressbook and KOrganizer as client-side components. The Kroupware project is currently under development by the according companies and will be merged into KDE 3.2.

  4. Re:strange by tjansen · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article is wrong: the german government did not fund work on KDE, a t least not directly. A number of companies have been contracted to extend KDE for the government. As the code is GPL, they have to release it to the public.