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GroupDAV: Standardizing Groupware
IGnatius T Foobar writes "There are lots of open source groupware products out there, but the perpetual problem has always been that we don't have a single, unified standard protocol to connect open source groupware clients to open source groupware servers. GroupDAV changes all that. Support for GroupDAV now exists in Citadel, OpenGroupware.org, KDE Kontact, and connectors are currently in beta for Evolution and Mozilla Sunbird. Unlike CAP and CalDAV, the GroupDAV effort is backed by real code that works today. "
No bug... PEKAC, I would look into it as soon as possible
Now all we need to do is get Microsoft to adopt the GroupDAV protocol in Exchange/Outlook.
I feel confident this can be done on February 30th of this year.
I'm a big tall mofo.
DAV is versioning, especially relevant to concurrency in groups. How does GroupDAV model that kind of versioning? And how are our existing, divergent client apps supposed to represent that?
--
make install -not war
what exactly?
And it works on Groupwise, Outlook/Exchange, Mail.app... what, it doesn't work on the software that most people actually use? Then who's going to use it outside of a few small Linux-only dev shops?
Or less sarcastically, what's been the effort on getting large vendors to support the new standard?
How will this get me laid?
And this lack of a GroupWare standard is EXACTLY why organizations like mine (state government) still turn to MS.
If we could get an opensource standard that worked with exiting MS standards then we would switch, if for nothing else then price alone.
Although this is a great step in the right direction, I still think is only going to be limited adoption until open source supports MS Exchange. Outlook/Exchange is so common in companies (big users of groupware) that open source is hurting itself by not supporting it.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
for reals. i blame it on the general slowness of slashdot.
We need more groupware so we can all work in our meagre jobs that we have in call centres and keeps our heads down and shut up and do our job. And so we can send email to someone who is sitting 2 feet away from us.
Come back Lotus Notes all is forgiven.
Why don't people finish things that have already been started, such as CAP (Calendar Access Protocol).
who clog the pipes for a living. Read "phb". I would go into it, but Nat (of Collabra/Netscape) says it best. "Groupware Bad" http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (yes, the same link that Doc posted on his blog).
Now if Microsoft will just support it we will be all set. Oh, wait...
That's great, another standard. But, this one is different because it is supported by Citadel? OpenGroupware and Kontact. These aren't mainstrean groupware systems. In fact all of them combined don't have enough users to establish yet another "standard".
The fact is that there are already more than enough standards out there. What needs to happen is for the groupware systems to start thinning the crowd of standards and settle on a limited set. And, to those that would say that GroupDav is just that, please, Until the likes of Exchange, GroupWise, and Notes include it and Oulook Express and CW have it built in, it is just "Yet Another Standard".
Seriously, are outlook meeting invites so complicated that they cannot be read outside of outlook? I hate outlook.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Although I agree standardization is important. We should also consider that it brings certain risks as well. For example, Microsoft Office has become a defacto standard for enterprises to use. By doing this, there were standard exploits for millions of systems. (Hence, the I Love You virus.)
I am all for standardization, as long as proper security controls are put in place as well.
Due to a recent posting on slashdot I looked up the current status of CalDAV and GroupDAV. There are pros and cons to each. One of the nice things about CalDAV is that someone is already working on a MAPI CalDAV connector for Outlook (http://openconnector.org/). Maybe it could be re-worked for GroupDAV, but right now it's CalDAV. That gives it a big lead in my book. This could easily change of course.
Personally I don't care which one is better right now. I just need software that will make Outlook work with my Unix/Linux servers. I have not doubt Evolution/Sunbird/etc will work with whatever standard becomes popular.
this may seem slightly off-topic, but one of the reasons I love thunderbird is Portable thunderbird. The ability to port the entire application wherever I want is great. You don't just have to run it off a USB-key: I run it off of a shared network drive and it works great (I can access it on any computer easily, and I don't have to use the email application otherwise supplied at work). Now the on-topic part: I think this new groupware standard has the possibility of allowing moderately techno-savvy computer users (and business-people) to access what they need in a portable fashion. Portable Thunderbird + Portable Sunbird + Good Groupware Standards will allow much simpler connectivity when you're on the road and forced to use someone else's computer. I want Sunbird to be as powerful (and portable) as thunderbird, and I think this standard is a step in the right direction.
Maybe things have changed since the last time I used Lotus Notes (version 3 I think) about eight years ago.
Lotus Notes is groupware (among other things). Lotus notes used to have a native unix version.
IBM owns Lotus Notes.
IBM is heavily into linux.
You would think it would be the standard that the others would try to interoperate with.
Why am I not hearing about Lotus Notes on linux? Did something change while my back was turned?
so if you say microsoft is a standard (ok, its used by a lot of ppl, but a standard is by definition something from an upper committee like iso or rfc or din, not a single firm itself)
I've got terrible news for most Slashdotters, that isn't the definition of a standard. The fact that many Microsoft products, such as Exchange, are used by more people and organizations than any other available product makes those Microsoft products the de facto standard. This will naturally come as a shock but, that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Exchange is the de facto standard in GroupWare applications.
You can brand me a heretic and mod me down but that won't change the facts or the standard.
It's good to see that someone is trying to invent a solution to this, but it really is only part of the problem.
OSS is all about choice. Choice is a good thing! Unfortunatly it lends itself to 100 different programmers approaching the same problem 100 different near-incompatibile ways. This is the downside of choice - people are not always going to agree on how to do something (read: almost never agree). This can be seen all over the place, noteably in programs designed for X (think KDE vs GNOME) - not as bad as it used to be, but it's still quirky as hell if you want to run applications from one group in the other.
It would be nice if we could say "screw choice, we need a BDFL" for at least a few essential pieces of glue.
Now, fast forward to Redmond. Microsoft applications are almost always tightly interoperable because there *isn't* choice. By this, I mean the group is working toward a single vision of how the operating system should be. The result (os vulnerabilities aside) is a more productive environment where most programs can interchange data very easily. This couldn't work without a certain amount of forced regulation.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The GroupDAV standard is nice and simple, and it ought to be easy enough to implement. However, it's lacking in various useful features. For instance,
Due to this reasons the client SHOULD store alarms locally and SHOULD NOT transmit them to server. The server is MAY reject iCalendar resources containing alarms but MUST signal that using a proper error code.
Woo. I use a GroupDAV server to store my calendar information from my desktop. While I'm on the road, I synchronise my PDA against it. Then I have to go through every event to reset the alarms, since otherwise I don't get any warning about them. Excellent.
Clients SHOULD not post recurring tasks to the server.
I mean, come on.
To allow the client to search for UIDs stored in the server, the server would need to expose the UID as a WebDAV property for use in DASL queries. While this is possible in some implementations (eg OpenGroupware.org ZideStore) it would complicate basic implementations significantly.
Yeah, I can see that making synchronisation fun.
The standard is littered with "This is difficult, so it's not implemented". That's fine - it results in a lightweight specification that's easy to implement, and in many cases it may well be good enough. But it's not appropriate for this to be the standard for open source groupware. It's missing too much functionality. Trying to sell it as a solution for competing with existing groupware solutions is just insane.
I've been bitching about that for a LONG time now, and Sunbird/etc has really progressed no further. It can't even read its *own* invites sometimes.
This was a huge issue when I was trying to move a small business off of Outlook. The integrated calendar is the main thing that kept them locked into Outlook. No Exchange, mind you, just the simple Outlook calendaring. WebDAV calendars/etc just didn't cut it. Can't schedule things like, oh, conference rooms. Can't apply designate rights. Lots of things that Outlook *can* do.
Who cares as long as something happens. From what I can tell so far, CalDAV is a better system, though more complex than GroupDAV. CAP? I wish there was an opensource project years ago. It hasn't happened... so we're on to using DAV. DAV is fine with me. Dunno for sure, but it sounds like I can use Apache with some web app back end (e.g. PHP, java, etc). This is good. I like modular. I like being able to use OpenLDAP and Cyrus IMAP, but being able to choose something else if something better comes along.
I keep hearing about Citadel, isn't that a monolithic app? That's what I'm trying to get away from!
...well, unless you dig Pointy-Haired-Bosses.
What you are looking for is an Open GroupSEXWare application. There's probably one on SourceForge but like many projects there I'd bet it's been stuck at the "Planning" stage for years.
In addition to the IETF-style interop checklist we ran over the course of two sessions, we also had demonstrations of things like Sunbird and Outlook sharing a calendar on the basis of a CalDAV adapter for Exchange (written by Oracle). Is this code that's not real? That would make me and others sad, because we spent a fair bit of time writing this code, and it sure seemed real when we ran it and shared calendars!
I'm also interested, as someone who works on Sunbird pretty much every day, to hear more about this "Sunbird connector" that is in beta. I haven't seen it yet, and we're always looking for useful new providers -- where is the beta testing being done? (The discussion of the implementations on the groupdav.org site confused me -- why would you need to have a server as a goal for a client-side connector? Isn't the whole point of a pseudo-standard like GroupDAV that you code to the protocol and not the peer?)
Mike
what about CVS?
You two are talking about different senses of the word "standard": one is the sense of "something that a lot of people use", the other is the sense of "a protocol or API that a lot of people code to". Among standards, we distinguish "de facto standards" and "official standards", where it is generally understood that something is an official standard unless you qualify it explicitly (just like it is usually understood that birds can fly unless you specifically talk about flightless birds).
Exchange is a "de facto standard" in the sense that it's a product a lot of people use. But it isn't a "standard" in the sense of being something that has been defined in writing that people can write interoperable products for.
Now, Win32 and Java are "de facto standard" in the sense of being something well-defined. One may or may not choose to re-implement or interoperate with them, but at least that is something one can talk about. For Exchange, there simply is nothing one can target, it is just a proprietary piece of software.
So, harping on the fact that Exchange is a "de-facto standard" is useless in the context of this discussion: the fact that lots of people use it is not relevant to the question of what kinds of protocols FOSS groupware should use since we can't use Exchange's protocols.
What FOSS can and should do is make FOSS alternatives to Exchange and Outlook look and feel as close as possible to Microsoft products so that administrators and users will accept it more easily, and that interoperate as much as possible with existing Exchange servers and Outlook clients. And that's exactly what they are doing. So, the fact that Exchange is a "de facto standard" isn't big "terrible" news to Slashdotters, it is something that has already been incorporated into FOSS plans for Exchange alternatives to the degree technically possible.
There's a problem with my chair and my keyboard? Shit, everything's broken!
However, it's feature-limited. They don't even seem to care about good iCalendar interoperability. Fluffy the Cat seems to have this right. I see this idea becoming dead in the water or not taking off until they get full iCalendar support.
You mention task lists.
...
Task lists are outlines (if they are to be useful).
A way to exchange outlines between platforms would be great.
I'd say 'fat chance' because the outliner authors haven't been able to do it since Microsoft came out with Word's outlines, which won't import or export reliably. But, perhaps
what about hula?0 05/02/p r05014.html
...
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2
"Feb. 15, 2005 -- Novell today announced the formation of Hula(TM), a new community project to create an open source collaboration server. "
"Hula today includes standards-based e-mail, calendaring and address book functionality that can scale to 250,000 registered users on a single PC with 50,000 simultaneously connected users."
I haven't had a chance to really look for more info, but this looks promising on the surface.
Did we already try this? http://web.archive.org/web/20010223211530/http://w ww.ogsproject.org/ in 2001! It even made it onto /. http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/13/1854219.shtm l. Did it go anywhere? no!
t &forum_id=0&group_id=0&atid=0&words=groupware&Sear ch=Search?
Why not look at something that is useful outside of groupware like building on top of syncML or using xmlrpc/soap or something that is designed for real time data exhange. Then you can hook other applications into your groupware too, not simply share between a handful of groupware platforms. DAV+[i|v]Ca[l|rd] looks nice and suggests supporting existing open standards, but it isn't a real solution.
I don't have all the answers but, here goes for a list of the problems I see with with GroupDAV:
* DAV is designed for file storage
* [i|v]Ca[l|rd] is designed for import/export not sharing
* What else uses this "standard"
* Why go for something which is lowest common domininator?
* Shouldn't efficiency of the protocol, not the speed of a few apps implementing it be the major considration?
Side question - has any other groupware suites been invited to participate? Like "FOSS Champion" Novell's Groupwise or Open Souce Crusader IBM's subsiduary Lotus with Notes? What about any of these http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=sof
Come on we can do better than a half baked concept that has taken 4 years to go anywhere - technology moves on - and we should too!
Hmmm, I think that maybe you are mis-interpreting what they mean when they say standard. Going off of your links, I am assuming that you are using the sixth definition of standard:
and the first definition of de facto:
So you are saying that Exchange is the actual product that is widely employed. This is different to saying somethings conforms to a standard, such as an ISO standard or an IETF standard. I'd say that these use either definition 2.a:
or from further down the page, the first definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Law
So you can see that these are in actual fact two very different things you are talking about and that one type of standard is not the same kind of thing as the other.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
You say:
> If we could get an opensource standard that worked with exiting MS standards then we would switch
Which means that you believe that Microsoft has a standard.
If that's the case, then, point to it. Show us the document that describes the Microsoft standard.
You can't, can you? That's because there isn't one.
Not only does Microsoft purposely break existing published standards, but they also keep their own bastardized protocols a secret.
In fact, Microsoft doesn't even follow their own "standards," instead changing them from version to version, in order to force their users to upgrade.
You're not trapped because of anything that Open Source does or fails to do.
You're trapped because you let Microsoft encode your own data into secret Microsoft protocols.
And you're such a fool, that you don't even realize it.
Microsoft loves fools like you. You're all keeping Microsoft rich.
I don't think it's intentional not to integrate. If it were, then why is it listed in the Sunbird requirements?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Why would he file a bug report when it's already listed as a requirement? It's not as if grokking Outlook invites is some crazy newfangled idea. The Moz Calendar folks know it needs to be done before Sunbird could be construed to be even remotely useful.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Nice.
www.open-xchange.org
Yep Outlook works with that. Just a little complex install.
This is not a show stopper just makes you have to live with java.
Lotus Notes is part of this transition, and my guess is that with the release after the upcoming release (R7 is currently in public beta) the Notes client as we know it ceases to exist and is replaced by something that is based on Eclipse.
Just "cease to exist" would be just fine, by me.