Kolab.org Groupware Solution

I just committed a small Roundcube feature that adds date interval selector to the search options popup. IMAP search query using BEFORE and SINCE keywords will be generated from the selected interval option. See it on the screenshot. On the ... [More] screenshot you can also notice another small feature that will be part of Roundcube 1.2. It is a messages list page selector, you can use it to directly jump to the specified page.   [Less]

The Kolab’s file storage component, named Chwala, from the beginning listed all folders of type ‘file’ available to the user. The subscription state of a folder was ignored. This changed today. From now on Chwala API returns only subscribed folders ... [More] , the same as other components. Of course, user is able to subscribe or unsubscribe a folder. Together with this folder filtering and searching has been implemented. So, you can now quickly filter displayed folders (which is useful when you have many of them). You can also search for unsubscribed folders and subscribe them (i.e. add to the permanent folders list). The search is smart enough to search by folder name and user name, so searching in other users namespace also works. Key-press filtering is implemented “in the browser” so it works fast. To search unsubscribed folders (server-side) you have to press Enter key. Exactly the same as folder search in other components. Figure 1. Folders list with the new header and search icon. Figure 2. Searching for unsubscribed folders. Figure 3. Subscribed folder added to the list. For the moment it only works with Kolab storage. Other storage drivers supported by Chwala, i.e. WebDAV and SeaFile do not support subscriptions. In the future we may implement this as well.   [Less]

It's always fun when your remote colleagues are coming to visit the office. It helps communication putting a face to the name in the chat client - and the voice on the phone. Giles, our creative director, was visiting from London the first days of ... [More] the week, which made a lot of the work switch context to be about design and usability. As Giles is fairly new in the company we also spent some time discussing a few of our internal processes and procedures with him. It is great to have him onboard to fill in a previously not so investigated space with his large experience. The server development team kept themselves busy with a few Roundcube issues, and with a few issues that we had in the new KolabNow dashboard. Additionally work was being done on the Roundcube-Next POC. We hope soon to have something to show on that front. On the desktop side, we finalized the sprint 201539 and delivered a new version of Kontact on Windows and on Linux. The Windows installer is named Kontact-E14-2015-10-02-12-35.exe, and as always it is available on our mirror. This Sunday our datacenter is doing some maintenance. They do not expect any interruption, but be prepared for a bit of connection troubles on Sunday night. On to the future..   [Less]

As we started the week already the previous Friday night (by shutting off the KolabNow cockpit and starting the big migration) it turned out to be a week all about (the bass) KolabNow. Over the weekend we made a series of improvements to KolabNow ... [More] that will improve the over all user experience with Better performance More stable environment Less downtime Our ability to update the environment with a minimum of interruption for endusers. After the update, there were of course a few issues that needed to be tweeked, but details aside, the weekend was a big success. Thanks to the OPS staff for doing the hard work. One thing we changed with this update was the way users get notified when their accounts are suspended. Before this weekend, users with suspended accounts would still be able to login and receive mail on KolabNow. After this update, users with suspended accounts will not be able to login. This was of course leading to a small breeze of users with suspended accounts contacting support with requests for re-enabeling of their accounts. On the development side we were making progress on two fronts: We are getting close to the end of the list of urgent Kontact defects. The second week of this sprint should get rid of that list. Our Desktop people will then get time to look forward again, and look at the next generation of Kolab Desktop Client. We started experimenting with one (- of perhaps more to come) POCs for Roundcube-Next. We now need to start talking about the technologies and ideas behind that new product. More to follow about that. Thank you for your interest - if you are still reading. :-)   [Less]

Another week passed by; super fast, as we know that: Time is running fast when you have fun. The client developers are on a roll. They have been hacking away on a defined bundle of issues in Korganizer and Zanshin, which has been annoying for users ... [More] , and has prevented some organizations from adapting the desktop client. This work will proceed during the next sprint - and most probably the sprint after that. One of our collaborative editing developers took part in the ODF plugfest. According to his report, a lot of good experiences were had, a lot of contacts were made, and there was good feedback for the plans of the deep Kolab/Manticore integration. Our OPS people was busy most of the week with preparations for this weekends big KolabNow update. This is a needed overhaul of our background systems and software. As we now have the new hardware in place, and it has been running it's test circles around itself, we can finally start applying many of the improvements that we have prepared for some time. This weekend is very much a backend update; but an important one, which will make it easier for us to apply more changes in the future with a minimal amount of interruptions. All y'all have a nice weekend now..   [Less]

We just published updates to both stable versions 1.0 and 1.1 after fixing many minor bugs and ensuring compatibility with upstream versions of 3rd party libraries used in Roundcube. Version 1.0.6 comes with cherry-picked fixes from the more recent ... [More] version to ensure proper long term support. See the full changelog here. Both versions are considered stable and we recommend to update all productive installations of Roundcube with either of these versions. Download them from roundcube.net/download. As usual, don’t forget to backup your data before updating!   [Less]

The week in development: Our desktop people were spending time in Randa, a small town in the Swiss mountains, where they were discussing KDE related issues and hacking away together with similar minded people. Most probably they also got a chance or ... [More] two for some social interaction. Work was continued on the Copenhagen (MAPI integration) project. Where as it was easy to spot progress in the beginning, the details around folder permissions and configuration objects that are being worked out now are not as visible. The Guam project (the scalable IMAP session and payload filter) is moving along as planned. The filter handling engine is in place. It is now being implanted into the main body of the system, and then work on the actual filter formulation can be started. A few defects in Kolab on UCS was discovered in the beginning of the week. Those were investigated and are getting fixed as I am writing this. Hopefully we will be able to push a new package for this product early next week. In other news: The engineering people are working hard to prepare the backend systems for some interesting upcoming KolabNow changes. There will be more information about those changes in other more appropriate places. Only thing left is, to wish everyone a very nice weekend.   [Less]

After a summer with ins and outs of the super hot Zurich office, this week finally brought some rain and a little chill. I can't wait for the snow to start. The week started early and in full speed, as we had our hardware vendor visiting on Monday to ... [More] replace a defect hypervisor. I sleep better at night knowing that everything is in order again. A few of us was jumping on a bus to the fair city of Munich, to meet the techies at IT@M IT@M for a Kontact workshop; 3 days of intense desktop client talks, discussions and experiments. It was inspiring to see the work groups get together to resolve issues, do packaging on the LiMux platform and prepare pre-deployment configurations. A big value of the workshop was the opportunity to collect and consolidate a lot of end user experience. Luckily we also got time for a bit of pretaste of the special Wiesn bier. Aside from discussing the desktop clients, creating packages and listening to use cases, Christian finally found and resolved the issue that for a while has prevented me from installing the latest Kontact on my fedora 22. Thanks Christian!   [Less]

Kontact has, in contrast to Thunderbird, integrated crypto support (OpenPGP and S/MIME) out-of-the-box. That means on Linux you can simply start Kontact and read crypted mails (if you have already created keys). After you select your crypto keys ... [More] , you can immediately start writing encrypted mails. With that great user experince I never needed to dig further in the crypto stack. But on Windows there is no GnuPG installed as default, so I need to dig into the whole world of crypto layers, that are between Kontact and the actual part that does the de-/encryption. Crypto Stack Kontact uses a number of libraries that the team has written around GPGME. The lowest level one is gpgmepp which is an object oriented wrapper for gpgme. This lets us avoid having to write code in C for KMail. Than we have libkleo which is a library built on top of gpgmepp that KMail uses to trigger de-/encryption in the lower levels. GPGME is the only required dependency to compile Kontact with crypto support. But this is not enough to send and receive encrypted mail with Kontact on Windows, as I mentioned earlier. There are still runtime dependencies that we need to have in place. Fortunatelly the runtime crypto stack is already packaged by the GPG4Win team. Simply installing is still not enough to have crypto support, though. With GPG4Win, it is possible to select OpenPGP keys, create and read encrypted mails, but unfortunatelly it doesn't work with S/MIME. So I had to dig futher into how GnuPG is actually working. OpenPGP is handled by the gpg binary and for S/MIME we have gpgsm. Both are directly called from GPGME, using libassuan. Both application than talk to gpg-agent, which is actually the only programm that interacts with the key data. Both application can be used from the commandline, so it was easy to verify, that they were working and that we have no problems with GnuPG setup. So first we start by creating keys (gpg --gen-key and gpgsm --gen-key) and than further testing what works with GPG4Win and what does not. We found a bug in GnuPG in the used version, but this one was closed in a newer version. Still Kontact didn't want to communicate with GPG4Win. The reason was a wrong standard path, preventing gpgme from finding gpgsm. With that fixed, we now have a working crypto stack under windows. But to be honest, there are more application involved in a working crypto stack. At first we need gpgconf and gpgme-w32-spawn to be available in the Kontact directory. gpgconf helps gpgme to find gpg and gpgsm and is responsible to modify the content of .gnupg in the user's home directoy. Additionally, it infoms you about changes in config files. gpgme-w32-spawn is responsible for creating the other needed processes. For having a UI where you can enter ypur password you need pinentry. S/MIME needs another agent, that does the CRL / OCSP checks. This is done by dirmgnr. In GnuPG 2.1 dirmgnr is the only component that performs connections to the outside. So every request that requires the Internet is done via dirmgnr. This is, in short, the crypto stack that needs to work together to give you working encrypted mail support. We are happy, that we now have a fully working Kontact under windows (again!). There are rumours, that Kontact was working also before that under windows with crypto support, but unfortunatelly when we started the crypted part was not working. This work has done in the kolabsys branch, which is based on KDE Libraries 4. The next steps are to merge changes over to make sure that the current master branch of Kontact, which uses KDE Frameworks 5, is also working. Randa Coming up next week is the yearly Randa meeting where we will have the chance to sit together for a week and work on the future of Kontact. This meetings help tremendously in injecting momentum into the project, and we have a variety of topics to cover to direct the development for the time to come (and of course a lot of stuff to actively hack on). If you’d like to contribute to that you can help us with some funding. Much appreciated!   [Less]

You're live! Nice. We've put together a little post to introduce you to the Ghost editor and get you started. You can manage your content by signing in to the admin area at <your blog URL>/ghost/. When you arrive, you can select this post from ... [More] a list on the left and see a preview of it on the right. Click the little pencil icon at the top of the preview to edit this post and read the next section! Getting Started Ghost uses something called Markdown for writing. Essentially, it's a shorthand way to manage your post formatting as you write! Writing in Markdown is really easy. In the left hand panel of Ghost, you simply write as you normally would. Where appropriate, you can use shortcuts to style your content. For example, a list: Item number one Item number two A nested item A final item or with numbers! Remember to buy some milk Drink the milk Tweet that I remembered to buy the milk, and drank it Links Want to link to a source? No problem. If you paste in a URL, like http://ghost.org - it'll automatically be linked up. But if you want to customise your anchor text, you can do that too! Here's a link to the Ghost website. Neat. What about Images? Images work too! Already know the URL of the image you want to include in your article? Simply paste it in like this to make it show up: Not sure which image you want to use yet? That's ok too. Leave yourself a descriptive placeholder and keep writing. Come back later and drag and drop the image in to upload: Quoting Sometimes a link isn't enough, you want to quote someone on what they've said. Perhaps you've started using a new blogging platform and feel the sudden urge to share their slogan? A quote might be just the way to do it! Ghost - Just a blogging platform Working with Code Got a streak of geek? We've got you covered there, too. You can write inline <code> blocks really easily with back ticks. Want to show off something more comprehensive? 4 spaces of indentation gets you there. .awesome-thing { display: block; width: 100%; } Ready for a Break? Throw 3 or more dashes down on any new line and you've got yourself a fancy new divider. Aw yeah. Advanced Usage There's one fantastic secret about Markdown. If you want, you can write plain old HTML and it'll still work! Very flexible. That should be enough to get you started. Have fun - and let us know what you think :)   [Less]