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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. "

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Question number one by alachyr · · Score: 5, Interesting
  2. Unlike what now? by Mike+Shaver · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Unlike CAP and CalDAV, the GroupDAV effort is backed by real code that works today.
    Huh. I participated in an interop in January in which we had CalDAV implementations from 3 different vendors interoperate pretty darned well. (Where they didn't the limitations were almost exclusively due to differences in handling of various ICS details, which problem plagues all ICS-based calendaring efforts, from CAP to GroupDAV and beyond.)

    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