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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. "
I didn't know what it was either. Apparently it's software that helps manage to efforts of groups of people, allowing them to collaborate on projects. So it's exactly what's needed for a distributed OSS project. Refer to useability first for some details.
Not that I have much experience, but visiting Slashdot may be entirely the wrong way to go about answering that particular question ...
(For those who think parent is a troll: here's the idea, with relevant bits highlighted)
"Exchange only supports SMTP, POP and IMAP because they have to, in order to interact with the rest of the world"
That isn't entirely true. SMTP is needed to interact with the rest of the world, but POP and IMAP is not needed by Exchange/Outlook. These were added for use by third mail clients, that can't talk the native Exchange protocol.
So from that perspective if enough companies are interested in GroupDAV and want to see it supported, but don't want to migrate away from Exchange (for various reasons), perhaps MS could be persuaded to add GroupDAV support. This would at least allow other clients to play, doesn't do much for OSS GroupDAV servers though...
My company was planing on migrating from NT4 domain / Exchange 5.5 / SQL2000 / Win2k desktops to more platform independant solutions - Novell NDS / Groupwise / mix of SQL2k & PostgreSQL / mix of Linux & W2k desktops
The show stopper? PDA synch with shared calendar used by management. The PDAs synch through outlook. Outlook doesn't talk to Groupwise calendaring. Exchange 2003 requires Active Directory. Having AD makes SQL2005 directory integration an option now...
5 crappy PDAs and not wanting to retrain people on a new mail client is directing our infrastructure....*snif*
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
Despite the name, WebDAV itself does not provide any versioning, thats part of DeltaV, a separate specification.
Concurrency in GroupDAV is handled using HTTP etags which can be used ensure modification consistency. You might want to read the draft.
In the _target software of GroupDAV_ which are OpenSource servers and clients, the reason is pretty simple to explain:
CAP requires a major effort to get implemented, mostly because its not HTTP.
The far majority of OpenSource servers have their roots in HTML web interfaces, often done in PHP or Perl. This is why simple HTTP protocols which do not require a degree in being understood are quickly implemented - XML-RPC, RSS, Atom.
GroupDAV is similiar in spirit, intended to be very small and easy to implement. As a bonus it intends to be a good basis to implement an "adult" protocol like CalDAV. Which is a thing the more elaborate groupware servers like OGo will certainly do.
Your observations are correct. The limitations are the result of research on how existing OpenSource groupware servers are implemented.
If you want to make them support some standard, you need to take their requirements into account.
As an example:
"Clients SHOULD not post recurring tasks to the server."
There are few servers which support them! Putting a requirement on this into the draft implies a rewrite/enhancement of 90%+ of the servers which is unrealistic and destroys the goal of having "some" reasonably good standard.
"Trying to sell it as a solution for competing with existing groupware solutions is just insane."
The GroupDAV effort doesn't try this. It tries to increase interoperability between opensource software in a pragmatic way.
It doesn't compete with anything, because there is no standard which covers this niche.
No. We just built around the assumption that the majority of servers can't do much but we are fully aware that there are some which are much more capable. Which is why we intentionally plan for an upgrade path to CalDAV which is much more powerful (but also more complex to implement).