So most of my life these days is taken up by…
Every now and then I get asked how I ended up involved with Kolab when I was already so involved with KDE. It has yet to be a surprise to anyone to find out that it is because of my dedication to KDE that I became involved with Kolab.
One of the things I love about Kolab is the use of Kontact as the primary client. For many reasons we call it the smart client at Kolab Systems. Kontact in its latest, fully Akonadified form is important because it brings the full Kolab experience both online and offline. It gives you all your “stuff”, now.
There is something else quite spiffy about Kontact:
Kontact on Linux
Kontact on OSX
Kontact on Windows
Kontact Touch on Maemo and Windows Mobile
Having an awesome client is important for any groupware. Having the awesome smart client is important for Kolab. If you want to get involved with either Kolab or Kontact, come and join either #kolab or #kontact on Freenode. It would be particularly great to see people become involved with testing on OSX, Windows and Kontact Touch on mobile.
You didn’t find a prettier widget style for making screenshots on Linux?
Hey Uetsah,
Updated screenies with Oxygen widgets will follow soon!
hate you Linux? or why make a so ugly sreenshot
sorry for may bad english
Hey Pins,
No, I don’t hate Linux
Beauty is in the eye if beholder! Clearly this is the Windows 95 retro-cool look!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Laurent Espitallier, Frank Osterfeld. Frank Osterfeld said: ♻ @padams New blog post: One Groupware, Four Platforms – http://blogs.fsfe.org/padams/?p=165 [...]
I guess the screenshots are not from the public relations department
Especially the Linux one…
What I think when I see is that the google apps look far more convenient to me. Is it just how they look or is kontact more for the advanced users?
Hey Burke,
You are absolutely right, Google Apps are hugely convenient. But convenience comes at a price:
1. Being completely web-based, you are in trouble whenever you do not have an Internet connection. Kontact provides you with a cache of your groupware experience allowing you to work offline and, at the very least, queue up new outgoing content.
2. Where is your content? Kolab runs on very modest hardware (I run it on an Asus EeeBox at home which is also doing a tonne of other home server stuff). Even if you outsource the hosting of Kolab, you still know where your stuff is. Which is great… people do actually amass gigabytes of groupware data. It’s not like you can rock up to the Googleplex with a blank DVD and say “I am leaving you. Please write all of my groupware content to this disk.”
3. What is happening to your content? The free edition of Google Apps may well have some nasty clauses about the use of your data hidden in their T&Cs. I don’t know, I am not a lawyer. I assume that things are better with the paid-for edition, but by this point you might as well pay for some hosted Kolab and take control of your data.
For me, convenience is having a client (for that is where the groupware experience “lives”) that operates on all the major desktop platforms and two mobile platforms. Convenience is backing that desktop/mobile client up with a variety of other options including 2 different mobile synchronisation technologies and a web client.
I think burke was more talking about usability here… And yes, kontact needs some work there – but first the basics – getting it to work on top of Akonadi at all…
hi paul,
let me be the first then to congratulate you with the amazing accomplishment.
i follow kontact as it is an important “should have” on the a free desktop, i knew akonadi would not be a one year plan, but i had full faith it would one day come together. these screenies make me feel that we’re getting close, if not already have arrived.
well done and good luck with your product!
cies breijs. (we met once on cebit, on the booth of zarafa talking about zpush and activesync)
p.s.: and yes i also saw the linux theme is default qt thingy. knowing that this is planned to be a native part of kde have no doubts this soon looks splendid.
Hey Cies,
How are you? I remember you well, we spoke at length about ZPush at CeBIT and more recently.
Thanks for your thoughts; I cannot really take any credit however. I am just a suit in amongst some really cool hackers. I will pass on your congratulations to them!
What about Akregator, isn’t the akonadi backend stalled on that one? And if it’s, is it likely that someone will continue to develope it in foreseeable future?
In any case, awesome! :d
Hey Teho,
Honest answer… I do not know! The Akregator support for Akonadi was implemented in a GSoC project back in 2008/9 I think. I do not know what its current state is. I will maybe blog about this later when I update the Linux screenies!
That would be higly appreciated, thank you.
AFAIK, Akregator is completely unmaintained and the port to Akonadi isn’t even complete.
Well, would be nice to see KMail2 working “enough well” in the desktop, currently it is a non-working-mess.
Hey Manolin,
KMail2 is currently unreleased, so you should not have high expectations of utility. Since you appear to be speaking from experience (which is great because there are few people using KMail2 atm), then you should drop some tickets in bugs.kde.org and let the KMail guys know what problems you are having. This should help keep things moving along nicely.
Hey Paul!
I have always closely followed Kontact since its inception, and I really like the idea of a cross-platform outlook-killer.
What I always had problems with is the weird UI-Design. To illustrate what I mean, I opened the linux-screenshot (win, mac would work, too) in gimp and used the bucket fill tool in the gray area. Everything that got filled red is wasted screen space. Oh my!
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/6906/kontacte5linuxcalendara.png
Using ppmhist shows that 125978 pixels are colored red now, THATS 18 PERCENT OF THE SPACE!
Why oh why do developers create so much free space between widgets? I just don’t understand.
[...] the original post: One Groupware, Four Platforms « Green Eggs and Ham Рубрика: Разные рубрики | Метки: awesome, awesome-client, come-and, [...]
[...] One Groupware, Four Platforms « Green Eggs and Ham [...]
[...] Paul Adams sur son blog nous montre que Kontact est aujourd’hui portable sur 4 plateformes : Linux, OS X, Windows et les mobiles (Maemo et Windows Mobile avec Kontact Touch). Source [en] : http://blogs.fsfe.org/padams/?p=165 [...]