Kolab.org Groupware Solution

We all know the annoyance of (web) applications not doing what we expect them to do and staring at the tumbling “Loading…” icons has become a part of our daily routine.  The more digital tools we use, the more sensitive we become for good user ... [More] experience. UX is the big buzzword and Roundcube Next is not only about faster development but also very much dedicated to significantly improve the way we interact with our webmail application of choice. By using top-notch open source technologies which have proven to work for the biggest web applications out there, Roundcube Next will be the responsive, reactive and simply gorgeous email application you want to use more than Gmail or Outlook. The core and the essentials are only the start and build a solid email client that can connect to any mailbox and will run everywhere, from your desktop browser to the device in your pocket. But our plans go beyond email and more perfectly integrated “apps” like calendar, chat, notes or cloud file access will follow. A first draft – Roundcube Next on iPad And we didn’t even mention the best part: Roundcube Next will be, just as its predecessor, free software and give you the freedom of choosing the email provider you trust and not the one who reads your mail. Help us make Roundcube Next the webmail application every serious internet service provider simply has to install for their users. Join the move and talk to your ISP about backing our crowdfunding project and finally get that new shiny thing installed for you and everybody else!   [Less]

We all know the annoyance of (web) applications not doing what we expect them to do and staring at the tumbling “Loading…” icons has become a part of our daily routine.  The more digital tools we use, the more sensitive we become for good user ... [More] experience. UX is the big buzzword and Roundcube Next is not only about faster development but also very much dedicated to significantly improve the way we interact with our webmail application of choice. By using top-notch open source technologies which have proven to work for the biggest web applications out there, Roundcube Next will be the responsive, reactive and simply gorgeous email application you want to use more than Gmail or Outlook. The core and the essentials are only the start and build a solid email client that can connect to any mailbox and will run everywhere, from your desktop browser to the device in your pocket. But our plans go beyond email and more perfectly integrated “apps” like calendar, chat, notes or cloud file access will follow. A first draft – Roundcube Next on iPad And we didn’t even mention the best part: Roundcube Next will be, just as its predecessor, free software and give you the freedom of choosing the email provider you trust and not the one who reads your mail. Help us make Roundcube Next the webmail application every serious internet service provider simply has to install for their users. Join the move and talk to your ISP about backing our crowdfunding project and finally get that new shiny thing installed for you and everybody else!   [Less]

Over the last few months I've been reading more than the usual number of papers on a selection of software development topics that are of recent interest to me. The topics have been fairly far flung as there are a few projects I have been poking at ... [More] in my free time. By way of example, I took a couple weeks reading about transitory trust algorithms that are resistant to manipulation, which is a pretty interesting problem with some rather elegant (partial) solutions which are actually implementable at the individual agent level, though computationally impractical if you wish to simulate a whole network which thankfully was not what I was interested in. (So reasonable for implementing real-world systems with, though not simulations or finding definitive solutions to specific problems.) This past week I've been reading up on a variety of B-tree algorithms. These have been around since the early 1970s and are extremely common in all sorts of software, so one might expect that after 40+ years of continuous use of such a simple concept that there'd be very little to talk about, but it's quite a vast territory. In fact, each year for the last two decades Donald Knuth has held a public lecture around Christmas-time about trees. (Yes, they are Christmas Tree Lectures. ;) Some of the papers I've been reading were published in just the last few years, with quite a bit of interesting research having gone on in this area over the last decade. The motivation for reading up on the topic is I've been looking for a tree that is well suited to storing the sorts of indexes that Akonadi Next is calling for. They need to be representable in a form that multiple processes can access simultaneously without problems with multiple readers and (at least) one writer; they also need to be able to support transactions, and in particular read transactions so that once a query is started the data being queried will remain consistent at least until the query is complete even if an update is happening concurrently. Preferably without blocking, or at least as little blocking as possible. Bonus points for being able to roll-back transactions and keeping representations of multiple historic versions of the data in certain cases. In the few dozen papers I downloaded onto the tablet for evening reading, I came across Transactions on the Multiversion B+-Tree which looks like it should do the trick nicely and is also (thankfully) nice and elegant. Worth a read if you're into such things. As those who have been following Akonadi Next development know, we are using LMDB for storage and it does a very nice job of that but, unfortunately, does not provide "secondary" indexes on data which Akonadi Next needs. Of course one can "fake" this by inserting the values to be indexed (say, the dates associated with an email or calendar event) as keys with the value being they key of the actual entry, but this is not particularly beautiful for various reasons, including: this requires manually cleaning up all indexes rather than having a way to efficiently note that a given indexed key/value pair has been removed and have the indexes cleaned up for you some data sets have a rather low cardinality which would be better represented with approaches such as bitmap indexes that point to buckets (themselves perhaps trees) of matching values being able to index multiple boolean flags simultaneously (and efficiently) is desirable for our use cases (think: "unread mails with attachments") date range queries of the sort common in calendars ("show this month", "show this week", e.g.) could also benefit from specialized indexes I could go on. It's true that these are the sorts of features that your typical SQL database server provides "for free", but in our case it ends up being anything but "free" due to overhead and constraints on design due to schema enforcement. So I have been looking at what we might be able to use to augment LMDB with the desired features, and so the hunt for a nice B+-tree design was on. :) I have no idea what this will all lead to, if anything at all even, as it is purely an evening research project for me at the moment. They application-facing query system itself in Akonadi Next is slowly making its way to something nice, but that's another topic for another day.   [Less]

While Roundcube One originates from a private fun project with email – and only email – in mind, we have learned our lessons and are committed to do Roundcube Next right from the ground up. In the year 2015, communication combines a variety of tools ... [More] we need to connect to each others. And that’s exactly what we aim to cover with the architectural design of Roundcube Next. It shall become a solid and open foundation for building communication apps on top of it. Email will certainly remain a key component as it still is the most important means of communication today. But there’s more and therefore we want to make Roundcube Next the WordPress of communication if you will. After we opened Roundcube up for plugins in version 0.3, we witnessed an amazing creativity in what people start building around an open source email application. From a car dealer system to mailing list archives, many custom solutions were built on top of Roundcube. This definitely inspired us to support and facilitate this aspect in the very core of the new system. The plugin infrastructure of Roundcube Next will be your new best friend for building web apps for your specific communication needs. The new core will provide an easy-to-use framework with lots of reusable components for both building the UI of your application as well as for synchronizing the data to the server and the underlying storage backend of your choice. So if you’re a developer who got annoyed with the limitations of closed systems from the big vendors and you don’t want to build a complex web application from scratch, Roundcube Next deserves your attention and support. Go to https://roundcu.be/next and get yourself a backstage pass for the Roundcube Next forums or even a seat in the advisory committee. And don’t forget to spread the word about this new opportunity for the free software world.   [Less]

While Roundcube One originates from a private fun project with email – and only email – in mind, we have learned our lessons and are committed to do Roundcube Next right from the ground up. In the year 2015, communication combines a variety of tools ... [More] we need to connect to each others. And that’s exactly what we aim to cover with the architectural design of Roundcube Next. It shall become a solid and open foundation for building communication apps on top of it. Email will certainly remain a key component as it still is the most important means of communication today. But there’s more and therefore we want to make Roundcube Next the WordPress of communication if you will. After we opened Roundcube up for plugins in version 0.3, we witnessed an amazing creativity in what people start building around an open source email application. From a car dealer system to mailing list archives, many custom solutions were built on top of Roundcube. This definitely inspired us to support and facilitate this aspect in the very core of the new system. The plugin infrastructure of Roundcube Next will be your new best friend for building web apps for your specific communication needs. The new core will provide an easy-to-use framework with lots of reusable components for both building the UI of your application as well as for synchronizing the data to the server and the underlying storage backend of your choice. So if you’re a developer who got annoyed with the limitations of closed systems from the big vendors and you don’t want to build a complex web application from scratch, Roundcube Next deserves your attention and support. Go to https://roundcu.be/next and get yourself a backstage pass for the Roundcube Next forums or even a seat in the advisory committee. And don’t forget to spread the word about this new opportunity for the free software world.   [Less]

If you are a user of Roundcube, you want to contribute to roundcu.be/next. If you are a provider of services, you definitely want to get engaged and join the advisory group. Here is why. Free Software has won. Or has it? Linux is certainly dominant ... [More] on the internet. Every activated Android device is another Linux kernel running. At the same time we see a shift towards “dumber” devices which are in many ways more like thin clients of the past. Only they are not connected to your own infrastructure. Alerted by the success of Google Apps, Microsoft has launched Office 365 to drive its own transformation from a software vendor into a cloud provider. Amazon and others have also joined the race to provide your collaboration platform. The pull of these providers is already enormous. Thanks to networking effects, economies of scale, and ability to leverage deliberate technical incompatibilities to their advantage, the drawing power of these providers is only going to increase. Open Source has managed to catch up to the large providers in most functions, bypassing them in some, being slightly behind in others. Kolab has been essential in providing this alternative especially where cloud based services are concerned. Its web application is on par with Office 365 and Google Apps in usability, attractiveness and most functions. Its web application is the only fully Open Source alternative that offers scalability to millions of users and allows sharing of all data types in ways that are superior to what the proprietary competition has to offer. Collaborative editing, chat, voice, video – all the forms of synchronous collaboration – are next and will be added incrementally. Just as Kolab Systems will keep driving the commercial ecosystem around the solution, allowing application service providers (ASP), institutions and users to run their own services with full professional support. And all parts of Kolab will remain Free and Open, as well as committed to the upstream, according to best Free Software principles. If you want to know what that means, please take a look at Thomas Brüderlis account of how Kolab Systems contributes to Roundcube. TL;DR: Around 2009, Roundcube founder Thomas Brüderli got contacted by Kolab at a time when his day job left him so little time to work on Roundcube that he had played with the thought of just stepping back. Kolab Systems hired the primary developers of Roundcube to finish the project, contributing in the area of 95% of all code in all releases since 0.6, driving it its 1.0 release and beyond. At the same time, Kolab Systems carefully avoided to impose itself on the Roundcube project itself. From a Kolab perspective, Roundcube is the web mail component of its web application. The way we pursued its development made sure that it could be used by any other service provider or ISV. And it was. Roundcube has an enormous adoption rate with millions of downloads, hundreds of thousands of sites and an uncounted number beyond the tens of millions. According to cPanel, 62% of their users choose Roundcube as their web mail application. It’s been used in a wide number of other applications, including several service providers that offer mail services that are more robust against commercial and governmental spying. Everyone at Kolab considers this a great success, and finds it rewarding to see our technology contribute essential value to society in so many different ways. But while adoption sky-rocketed, contribution did not grow in the same way. It’s still Kolab Systems driving the vast majority of all code development in Roundcube along with a small number of occasional contributors. And as a direct result of the Snowden revelations the development of web collaboration solutions fragmented further. There are a number of proprietary approaches, which should be self-evidently disqualified from being taken serious based on what we have learned about how solutions get compromised. But there are also Open Source solutions. The Free Software community has largely responded in one of two ways. Many people felt re-enforced in their opinion that people just “should not use the cloud.” Many others declared self-hosting the universal answer to everything, and started to focus on developing solutions for the crypto-hermit. The problem with that is that it takes an all or nothing approach to privacy and security. It also requires users to become more technical than most of them ever wanted to be, and give up features, convenience and ease of use as a price for privacy and security. In my view that ignores the most fundamental lesson we have learned about security throughout the past decades. People will work around security when they consider it necessary in order to get the job done. So the adoption rate of such technologies will necessarily remain limited to a very small group of users whose concerns are unusually strong. These groups are often more exposed, more endangered, and more in need of protection and contribute to society in an unusually large way. So developing technology they can use is clearly a good thing. It just won’t solve the problem at scale. To do that we would need a generic web application geared towards all of tomorrow’s form factors and devices. It should be collaboration centric and allow deployment in environments from a single to hundreds of millions of users. It should enable meshed collaboration between sites, be fun to use, elegant, beautiful and provide security in a way that does not get into the users face. Fully Free Software, that solution should be the generic collaboration application that could become in parts or as a whole the basis for solutions such as mailpile, which focus on local machine installations using extensive cryptography, intermediate solutions such as Mail-in-a-Box, all the way to generic cloud services by providers such as cPanel or Tucows. It should integrate all forms of on-line collaboration, make use of all the advances in usability for encryption, and be able to grow as technology advances further. That, in short, is the goal Kolab Systems has set out to achieve with its plans for Roundcube Next. While we can and of course will pursue that goal independently in incremental steps we believe that would be missing two rather major opportunities. Such as the opportunity to tackle this together, as a community. We have a lot of experience, a great UI/UX designer excited about the project, and many good ideas. But we are not omniscient and we also want to use this opportunity to achieve what Roundcube 1.0 has not quite managed to accomplish: To build an active, multi-vendor community around a base technology that will be fully Open Source/Free Software and will address the collaborative web application need so well that it puts Google Apps and Office 365 to shame and provides that solution to everyone. And secondly, while incremental improvements are immensely powerful, sometimes leapfrogging innovation is what you really want. All of that is what Roundcube Next really represents: The invitation to leapfrog all existing applications, as a community. So if you are a user that has appreciated Roundcube in the past, or a user who would like to be able to choose fully featured services that leave nothing to be desired but do not compromise your privacy and security, please contribute to pushing the fast forward button on Roundcube Next. And if you are an Application Service Provider, but your name is not Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple, Roundcube Next represents the small, strategic investment that might just put you in a position to remain competitive in the future. Become part of the advisory group and join the ongoing discussion about where to take that application, and how to make it reality, together.     [Less]

Today at 13:00 UTC I will be hosting a Google+ Hangout with Roundcube founder and lead developer, Thomas Brüderli. I will link the video below once we are done, but everyone is welcome to join us live and provide feedback and questions in IRC while ... [More] we're chatting. So, what are we going to talk about? Well, Roundcube, of course! :) I'll be asking Thomas why he decided that now was the appropriate time for a refactor of Roundcube, what it means for Roundcube 1.x (the current stable release), and if we have time we'll start tucking into the current feature and design thinking. So come join us on the Roundcube G+ page / Youtube channel as well as the #roundcube channel on irc.freenode.net today at 13:00 UTC! Hope to see you all there!   [Less]

It all started with this hypothetical question: how would we implement Roundcube if we could start over again? And now this idea has already grown into a concrete plan how to create the responsive, fast and beautiful successor of Roundcube. ... [More] The architectural changes necessary for this are clearly too big to be applied to the current Roundcube codebase without breaking the compatibility for most plugins and extensions. So we won’t take that risky path but rather start a new project in parallel with the goal to create a full replacement for Roundcube while giving everybody enough time to make themselves familiar with the new architecture and to adapt the existing plugins to the new API. There’s no doubt that such a major refactoring is a huge endeavor and requires a substantial effort in concepts, development and testing. Nothing to be done over the weekend but we also don’t want to spend another 10 years to make this become reality. Luckily we have strong partners and supporters to push this forward. Kolab Systems has offered to drive this project by contributing their well established software development capabilities, from project management, developer power to QA and testing. In addition to that, the folks at Kolab Digital can’t wait to share their expertise on the UX and design part. However, such a level of professionalism also comes with a price. Getting help from the crowd to back this In order to enable both Kolab Systems and Kolab Digital to actually assign the necessary resources to the “Roundcube Next” project, we sat together and decided that it would make sense to reach out to the entire Roundcube community to help make this happen. Yesterday, we proudly announced the crowd funding campaign at the end of the Kolab Summit in The Hague. Together, we can make this a great success! Please help spread the word, back the campaign with a pledge, and join us for what is going to be a fantastic journey. Regular updates will be posted to the crowd funding page, and we are excited to make the run to our initial goal and beyond with you!   [Less]

It all started with this hypothetical question: how would we implement Roundcube if we could start over again? And now this idea has already grown into a concrete plan how to create the responsive, fast and beautiful successor of Roundcube. ... [More] The architectural changes necessary for this are clearly too big to be applied to the current Roundcube codebase without breaking the compatibility for most plugins and extensions. So we won’t take that risky path but rather start a new project in parallel with the goal to create a full replacement for Roundcube while giving everybody enough time to make themselves familiar with the new architecture and to adapt the existing plugins to the new API. There’s no doubt that such a major refactoring is a huge endeavor and requires a substantial effort in concepts, development and testing. Nothing to be done over the weekend but we also don’t want to spend another 10 years to make this become reality. Luckily we have strong partners and supporters to push this forward. Kolab Systems has offered to drive this project by contributing their well established software development capabilities, from project management, developer power to QA and testing. In addition to that, the folks at Kolab Digital can’t wait to share their expertise on the UX and design part. However, such a level of professionalism also comes with a price. Getting help from the crowd to back this In order to enable both Kolab Systems and Kolab Digital to actually assign the necessary resources to the “Roundcube Next” project, we sat together and decided that it would make sense to reach out to the entire Roundcube community to help make this happen. Yesterday, we proudly announced the crowd funding campaign at the end of the Kolab Summit in The Hague. Together, we can make this a great success! Please help spread the word, back the campaign with a pledge, and join us for what is going to be a fantastic journey. Regular updates will be posted to the crowd funding page, and we are excited to make the run to our initial goal and beyond with you!   [Less]

Roundcube prouldy announces the crowd funding campaign to bring our vision of a better email experience to reality. The web has evolved a lot in the last decade, and we want Roundcube to take full advantage of the best web technologies available ... [More] today. Therefore it’s time for a dramatic change to the Roundcube architecture and to also to rethink email in general, how it’s used today and how we could use the new technologies to give the best user experience to everyday communication. Applying what we’ve learned from our first 10 years of experience developing Roundcube, we have been working on a development plan for how to achieve our new goals. And in order to finally make this happen, we also need your support to drive the professional software development process behind this plan. Please join the fun at roundcu.be/next and support our crowd funding campaign either directly or by simply spreading the word about it.   [Less]