Kolab.org Groupware Solution

In order to enable developers at the Kolab Technology Sprint to work on the same brand new code and to have a common platform, we have released a pre-alpha version of Kolab 3.0. This version is only intented for development and should never ever be ... [More] used on a production system since it might do all sorts of nasty unexpected things such as eating your children and causing a word-wide financial collapse. Here is a quick HOWTO by Jeroen van Meeuwen on installing and configuring the pre-alpha release of Kolab 3.0 on a CentOS 6.3 system. The setup is actually quite similar to installing Kolab 2.4 on CentOS 6.2. Install the epel-release package. At the time of this writing, this means executing: # rpm -Uvh http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpmInstall the kolab-3.0-community-release package. At the time of this writing, this means executing: # rpm -Uvh http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/redhat/kolab-3.0/el6/development/i386/kolab-3.0-community-release-6-1.el6.kolab_3.0.noarch.rpmInstall the kolab-3.0-community-release-development package. At the time of this writing, this means executing: # rpm -Uvh http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/redhat/kolab-3.0/el6/development/i386/kolab-3.0-community-release-development-6-1.el6.kolab_3.0.noarch.rpmInstall Kolab Groupware like so: # yum install kolabSetup Kolab with a minimal amount of interference: # setup-kolabThis will setup Kolab Groupware including LDAP, Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, Roundcube, Free/Busy and ActiveSync using the information available on the system and a minimal amount of input. For greater flexibility during the setup process, please read the Configuration chapter in the documentation. [Less]

Last week I was surprised to receive an email from Shane Coughlan inviting me to become a Fellow of the OpenForum Academy. The current Fellowship has some of my personal heroes in there and so it was exciting and humbling to receive such an offer. ... [More] From their website: OpenForum Academy is a think tank with a broad aim to examine the paradigm shift towards openness in computing that is currently underway, and to explore how this trend is changing the role of computing in society. and: OpenForum Academy is an independent programme established by OpenForum Europe. It has created a link with academia in order to provide new input and insight into the key issues which impact the openness of the IT market. Central to the operation of OpenForum Academy are the Fellows, each selected as individual contributors to the work of OFA. A number of academic organisations have agreed to work with OFA, working both with the Fellows and within a network of contributors in support of developing research initiatives. During Akademy last week I was very impressed by the keynote presentation given by Will Schroeder of Kitware. At the core of his talk was a concern that research should be open by default, but it isn’t: peer review is a black box and publishers charge a fortune for access to the final paper. Over dinner we spoke at length on this matter. I am lucky in that my career is no-longer tied to my publication record. This allows me the freedom to do my research when and where I want. Typically this means I treat all my research as “work in progress”. As and when I make little steps forward, I publish what I have done in my blog and gather feedback. I have now taken the decision that whenever I have a complete piece of work I will publish: in an open-access journal; my data and the method I used to gather it; any tools I used to process that data. I have always conducted my research as a benefit to the Free Software community. I’m extremely grateful to the OpenForum Academy for recognising this work and I take my new Fellowship as an opportunity to renew my commitment to making my research as open as I can. [Less]

Almost half a year ago I had the pleasure to write the Kolab 3.0 primer, and ways of getting involved. Optimistically I scheduled the release for May/June 2012 in that posting. Attentive readers may have noticed that it is no longer June and Kolab ... [More] 3.0 hasn’t been released yet. So perhaps it is time to provide an update and overview. The main culprits for delays in this first release done by the new team are pretty much the usual suspects: Everything is more work than expected, you end up having to do more than you initially planned, including unforeseeable interruptions and there was less help than you hoped for. The good news is: We’re almost there. Much work has gone into the invisible underbelly of the technology, starting from the Kolab XML format itself. Christian Mollekopf has done an unbelievable amount of work on libkolabxml and libkolab, the refactored Kolab XML format, and its API with wrappers in multiple programming languages to make Kolab integration as easy as being able to call the API to manipulate Kolab objects. Christian also put Kolab XML V2 format support into libkolab so that clients using libkolab can work against either version of the format, and largely finished a migration tool from version 2 to version 3 to provide users with a data upgrade path. And finally he re-based Kolab support in the KDE Kontact client that is the basis for our desktop client on libkolab for the KDE PIM 4.9 release already. In fact thanks to some supersonic packaging in the Fedora community I am already using libkolab with KDE PIM 4.9 rc 1 against all my Kolab 2.3 servers. Also we had to shed the dependency on the outdated Horde 3 framework for Kolab 3.0, which meant a good deal of conceptual work, such as coming up with a new Free/Busy System or dealing with conflicts in ways that are far superior than anything Kolab has ever done while maintaining full off-line capability, one of Kolab’s great advantages over other solutions. When looking at these pages it should become obvious how much time has gone into truly understanding the problems at hand and resolving them solidly in a way that is publicly documented and allows participation from anyone in the community. Enabling participation is in fact what we spent a lot of time on throughout the past months, from the Kolab Community web site relaunch, over the IRC meetings for Kolab 3.0 planning and development, to the hiring of Torsten Grote as Kolab Evangelist who went to work on the community resources straight away and is your dedicated community-go-to-guy-for-all-things-kolab, all the way to the intermediate release of Kolab 2.4 to make it easy for people to get Kolab servers up and running that would allow to tap into and participate in the ongoing development. That release also featured quite a bit of work by Jeroen van Meeuwen, our Systems Architect and specialist for the most complex set-ups that scale to hundreds of thousands of users or do things that are widely considered impossible. Again much of that work has happened in the background, but will be fundamental for a lot of things you’re about to see Kolab doing in the next years to come. Among these things are trimming back LDAP schema extensions to ensure that Kolab integrates into existing directory services more easily, be they in pre-existing corporate infrastructures, in products that wish to integrate Kolab, in cloud offerings or in proprietary directory services where Kolab provides the first bridgehead for migration towards more freedom of choice and Open Standards. Also Jeroen and Christoph have been giving a lot of thought to how resource management should work, because our experience all too often was that many things were not done right to enable the kinds of work flows and scenarios people wanted to implement – not just in Kolab, but pretty much anywhere. So we gave this one quite a bit of thought that Jeroen shared on his blog. Other parts are configuration management, including the REST inspired API for configuration of the server and the server underlying configuration management which will allow using any kind of configuration management in the future. And of course Jeroen was the key person to get the 2.4 release out of the door, as well as many other things. The first application to make use of that API is the new web administration front end developed by Aleksander Machniak, one of the main Roundcube developers on staff at Kolab Systems. Already available within Kolab 2.4, this web admin interface is independent of the kind of directory service or configuration mechanism used in the background and extensible to virtually any scenario. If you wonder how it looks, Jeroen put some screen shots up on his blog. And last but not least he has spent much time on getting our documentation up to speed. But of course it wouldn’t be a proper release without something falling victim to triage. In this case the victim is Server Side Akonadi. While it will add truly magical capabilities to the Kolab server, we designed the Kolab 3.0 release such that it would remain an optional component to make sure we preserve the ability to scale all the way down to small embedded devices. So because it is optional, and because we did not want to delay the release further, we have put it at the back of the priority chain and removed it from the list of blockers. But you should expect to find it in one of the next series 3 releases. And of course we haven’t stopped at having given Roundcube its push to the 0.7 release and developing our new web interface on top of it. We’re now also trying to think about how that next web client should look like and how to bring things together with the desktop clients. For this we are working together with the professional designer who is also responsible for the current and future Roundcube skins, and you can find some of his designs for the next generation web client of Kolab online here. If you have comments, we’d be happy to hear your input and receive your help. In case if you want to get involved in any of the areas we’re working on, the upcoming Kolab 3.0 Technology Sprint in Berlin is perfect place for that. This is also where we will be working on finishing of some of the more exciting things we’ve been playing with, such as ownCloud integration for the web interface. This is something we already have sketched in our webmail.klab.cc demo instance and several people have found this close to usable. So we’re overjoyed that Frank, Arthur and Georg of ownCloud will join us for the sprint and invite others who have technology or projects that would work with Kolab in interesting ways to also join us during that week. And we particularly invite packagers for all the various distributions out there to join us for the sprint. Because we would love to have Kolab 3.0 be natively available on all platforms just weeks after it is released, and make its way into the upstream distributions. Doing this ourselves for all distributions is more than we can reliably ensure, especially since we also have to take enterprise distributions such as Univention Corporate Server (UCS) into account that add substantial work on that front. Also, we’re not just developing the next generation server, we have also just enabled Mozilla Thunderbird & Lightning for professional usage with Kolab through plenty of work that has gone into SyncKolab by Niko Berger who has joined Kolab Systems to also provide a professional maintenance path for supported users. And naturally there are still customers who want support as we do all of the above. So even though I would still have plenty of things to feature I guess it should have become obvious that we have been far from inactive and I truly feel honoured and somewhat humbled to be working with such a great team of dedicated professionals and great minds. A lesser group could not have achieved that much in such short time, and Kolab 3.0 when it comes out this summer is going to be one exciting piece of technology. I hope you’ll give it a try and will check out our company web site for how we can assist you in your professional needs. But now, the magic incantation: Go forth and make Kolab 3.0!   [Less]

GIMP does not drive me to the airport if my flight is before 10am.

Shortly, I'll be off to travel to Tallinn, Estonia, to attend Ye Olde Annual KDE Conference aptly dubbed Akademy. This is going to be something new to me, to be honest. First, I'm new to Estonia - never been there before in my life. Second, I'm a ... [More] newbie in the KDE community. I haven't got the slightest clue what's awaiting me after I touch down, but for the stories my fellow Kolabian Paul Adams has shared with me. All of them funny, not all of them good... Furthermore, I must admit in all honestly, I myself am a GNOME user. By convenience, more than anything else, and though it's not supposed to be bad, of course, yet I feel like I might be walking into the lion's nest ;-) I'm confident I'll enjoy myself - but not in the way you're thinking of right now. I've heard Tallinn is a very beautiful city, and I regret not going to see much of it - if this conference is anything like the dozens of other conference I've been to. I'm sure there'll be plenty of KDE people who turn to be on speaking terms with a GNOME user after we have a good old-fashioned how-much-beer-can-you-chuck contest. Yet though, all fun aside, the strongest impression I need to make is not at any random bar. It's on stage, right in front of all those people. I'll be giving a talk titled "KDE Releases that Just Work(TM)" - this is supposed to be where I make my move. I've been practicing different stances to emphasize different points all week long. I'll speak to subjects I think I'm an expert on, and that I think are open for vast improvement within the KDE project. There's a couple of gotchas though; I'm not the only one to think he's an expert I'm not the only expert For release engineering and quality assurance and so ultimately the quality of releases to really improve, consensus between a large variety of people needs to be established, not all of them with anywhere near the same agenda, let alone anywhere near the same opinion. This sort of effort touches processes, tools, workflows and ultimately what the individual developer is doing. The trick is to find consensus on a way to improve (the use of) all those tools, to make all of that touching further enable the people that actually do the work - those that'll give me the evil stare for using GNOME - and make them feel empowered, and achieve greater satisfaction. [Less]

So, its that time of year again, the annual meeting of all things KDE… Akademy! This year it is coming to you from Tallin, Estonia. This year will be my 6th outing to the event Of course, KDE is very dear to me and to Kolab and so, in addition to ... [More] me, there will be a few other members of the Kolab community will meet at this year’s Akademy. Key contributors Christian Mollekopf and Jeroen van Meeuwen will be present and available to discuss Kolab related issues. Jeroen will also give a talk about release engineering processes using KDE as an example. His experience from the Fedora Project, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus SASL and from his roleas a Systems Architect at Kolab Systems provides him with ample experience to give some insight into how release engineering and quality assurance within the fast-paced KDE project could be improved further. The Kolaborators will also be taking part in a Task Management sprint featuring Zanshin and Kolab developers. If you are interested in task management in KDE, you are invited to join. The sprint will focus on counting work into bringing Zanshin-like experience to Kolab on the desktop and web. This meeting will take place during the workshop week after the main conference; no date or time has been set yet, but if you track down me, Christian or Kevin Ottens we’ll work it out. Akademy is one of my favourite conferences of the year and I’m really excited to be catching up with my KDE buddies. If you want to talk about Kolab (or anything else) just come track me down… I’ll be around until Wednesday. [Less]

The Kolab Community will hold the first Kolab 3.0 Technology Sprint to have some fun with awesome technology as the Kolab 3.0 development cycle is drawing to a close. The sprint will take place Monday 23rd of July through Friday 27th of July 2012 in ... [More] Berlin, Germany and is open to participation for everyone interested in Kolab and its various technologies. Components we already plan to work on include configuration management, ActiveSync, Free/Busy, OpenLDAP support and of course the next generation of the web client. More information can be found in the wiki page about the sprint. If you plan to participate, please add yourself to the Wiki page for the sprint. The sprint will be an excellent chance for everyone to get familiar with the new technology base for Kolab, get their favorite feature included by working on it, get to know the core developers of Kolab, discuss usability of the outstanding new web client with our team and usability expert Björn Balasz, and get involved in the discussion of where Kolab should be headed with its upcoming releases. Every day we will also have a talk by one of the main developers, starting with Systems Architect Jeroen van Meeuwen, on the technologies and new developments that underpin the Kolab Groupware Solution. The sprint will also provide a unique opportunity for providers of third party solutions to learn about the new integration options that Kolab 3.0 will offer, such as libkolab and its API to various programming languages. This allows any solution that wishes to interact with email, calendaring, address books or other groupware features to integrate against Kolab trivially. But of course the modular design also allows to add functional components easily. One example for such a low-hanging fruit of integration on the user interface is ownCloud, which has already seen some integration into the Kolab web client on http://webmail.klab.cc that you can try out yourself. And finally if you want to use Kolab 3.0 on your favorite distribution, the sprint will allow you to work with the developers and other packagers to get the new code base packaged so that when Kolab 3.0 gets released you can be among the first to have your Kolab 3.0 server up and running. The sprint will be supported by Kolab Systems AG and KDAB, who kindly provide their office space at Tempelhofer Ufer 11, 10963 Berlin for this sprint. Drinks and some food will be provided. We also plan a joint sprint dinner and Kolab 3.0 pre-release celebration which will be held when most of the participants (and especially those who did the hard lifting on the upcoming release) can actually enjoy it. [Less]