How to setup other clients than outlook or webmail

[jennix]

Hi all,

I set up Scalix 11.0.2 into two environments: first over an existing openSUSE 10.2 mailserver (seems to have no problems after installing python 2.4 additionally to python 2.5). Because this unveils following problems, i setup also an fresh and virgin openSUSE 10.1 in a VMware-Machine. The users have different clients like Outlook 2003 (via scalix-connector), Thunderbird 1.5 with Lightning (Win and Linux) or Kontact/KDE (both used with IMAP).
Problem is now in both installations, that only calendar-entries made with outlook are displayed correctly to all other users. If a user makes an entry with Kontact/KOrganizer, this entry will be submitted via Imap, Date and Time are correct, but the subject is now like this:

"iCal libkcal 3245454538836.6389233876745491236732158..."

Sometimes its only:

"iCal 7455465675234546742173423712..."

When i open such an entry in outlook, outlook says that this entry is colliding with other entries (even when the whole calendar is empty) and when i look at the collision-details, suudenly there is the same entry twice! And if i want to delete one of them, both are gone. In addition these entries cannot be edited, subject line is not editable.
Next problem is thunderbird: It is not showing any calendar-entry in lightning (which is AFAIK sunbird as a plugin), but the entries are listed in the calendar-folder in the Imap-account.
So because i have a mixed environment with 50% linux-stations, which should have access to the calendar and the majority of these users dont like either the scalix web-client nor evolution, which other client can be used without problems and how? Like its written in the description at the scalix website: "Our product also supports any POP or IMAP client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora and Outlook Express. It natively and transparently supports each mail client’s feature set, user interface and communications protocol, ensuring no end user disruption or retraining. We provide full interoperability between clients, enabling users to work interchangeably between their web and desktop clients for a fully synchronized view of their mail, calendar and contact data."

thanks for any help, regards, Jens

[jennix]

No idea?

[pgienger]

Added bolding for emphasis.

Like its written in the description at the scalix website: "Our product also supports any POP or IMAP client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora and Outlook Express. It natively and transparently supports each mail client’s feature set, user interface and communications protocol, ensuring no end user disruption or retraining. We provide full interoperability between clients, enabling users to work interchangeably between their web and desktop clients for a fully synchronized view of their mail, calendar and contact data."

I believe they are only stating that they provide an IMAP/POP sane mail client, calendaring tools would take a lot more dev to work logically. Assuming that, Sunbird may not be aware of how to cleanly post to this type of server and it's completely their problem to make it work against the Scalix server. I could be misinterpreting though.

[jennix]

Added bolding for emphasis.
I believe they are only stating that they provide an IMAP/POP sane mail client, calendaring tools would take a lot more dev to work logically. Assuming that, Sunbird may not be aware of how to cleanly post to this type of server and it's completely their problem to make it work against the Scalix server. I could be misinterpreting though.

I dont think so, because the last part of my quote is: "enabling users to work interchangeably between their web and desktop clients for a fully synchronized view of their mail, calendar and contact data". This sounds or me, that all clients used for mail, calendar and contact data are supported.

In my case its maybe a bug in KDE/KMail/Kontact or such thing, but noone gives me even a hint or a link for an howto to use Scalix with Kontact or Thunderbird. So i'm very disappointed because of the lack of support even for the community edition, so in this state i wouldnt recommend scalix to anybody in a heterogeneous environment. I believe, the community edition is a platform to develop scalix with help and assistance by the community. This is common and in my understanding a good way to get commercial success together with open source. But no answer from someone involved into scalix is simply, hmm, disappointing and makes a bad taste in my mouth.

regards, Jens

[florian]

Hi Jens,

first, the facts; the only clients that support server-side calendaring properly as of today are Outlook (with Scalix Connect installed), Scalix Web Access and Evolution (with the Scalix-Evolution Connector installed).

The reason for this is simply that there is no standard whatsoever that explains how to do calendaring over IMAP, so neither us nor the client people can do anything about this. Kontact - which I personally don't know that much - seems to do some calendar work over IMAP, but is basically using the IMAP server just as a store - so the only other client that can access their email-wrapped calendar messages is Kontact itself, the server doesn't do any interpretation. The format they use is defined by the Kolab project and it is a "proprietary" (though open source) standard of the project, but *not* an Open Standard that anybody else endorses. So even using a Kolab server, you don't get interoperable calendaring with any other client, including Sunbird or Evolution.

Evolution doesn't support server-side calendaring at all - we brought all this into it when we wrote our connector. Sunbird has no IMAP-based calendar access method, and nobody else has.

The fact that our Calendar folder, when generated by Outlook or SWA is visible via IMAP is that we decided to encode our calendar data in the most standards-based way that came to our mind, which is a standard MIME email with an iCal attachment that represents the calendaring object - this conforms to the IMAP spec (because to IMAP it's just an eMail with an attachment) and some clients (e.g. Entourage on the mac) can even see these emails, see them as iCal invites and import them into their local calendar. Not a full-blown solution.

Again, repeat - unfortunately, there is no open-standards based calendaring on the market today because the infrastructure and support for this simply doesn't exist.

Our marketing material is correct to the point in that we support any POP or IMAP based client within it's functional footprint, as it says '...each mail clients feature set...' which on the email side is correct.

So for Linux desktops the recommendation is to go with either Evolution or Scalix Web Access, which are both successfully used by a good number of our commercial customers as well as open source users.

No, as we really stand behind the principle of clients-of-choice, we would like to do more things and I believe calendar is the perfect example. And the time seems just right. Only two weeks ago, after several years of discussion, the CalDAV standard has turned into a RFC (4791 I believe) - this is the first time ever that a fully-accepted open standard for client/server calendaring exists, which is great. Thanks to the people involved for their great work.

Reality is that clients and products supporting CalDAV are currently a rare breed - Evolution does and so does Sunbird, but both implementations are far frm being complete. Apple has announced CalDAV support in their iCal client for the upcoming next version of their operating system - and they seem very serious about it as Cyrus Daboo, who is the CalDAV specs main author and the author of the Mulberry eMail client is now on their payroll and presumably working on the project.

Scalix is working on CalDAV support and we plan to release this sometime later this spring [and I hope I'm accurate with the definition of spring meaning late Q2 the latest]. This will enable standards-based calendaring clients to access our calendar data in a meaningful and interoperable way and hopefully open a wider door to open calendaring, which is something I believe in quite strongly.

Hope this helps, feel free to get back to us with further questions,
Florian.

[jennix]

Hi Jens,

first, the facts; the only clients that support server-side calendaring properly as of today are Outlook (with Scalix Connect installed), Scalix Web Access and Evolution (with the Scalix-Evolution Connector installed).

I dont have a problem with imap-calendaring if it works. I have a problem with forcing me to use clients that i dont know or like. So i decided to use Scalix because i thought it would let me decide. That was a mistake.

Again, repeat - unfortunately, there is no open-standards based calendaring on the market today because the infrastructure and support for this simply doesn't exist.

Our marketing material is correct to the point in that we support any POP or IMAP based client within it's functional footprint, as it says '...each mail clients feature set...' which on the email side is correct.

That may be true, but why your company isnt tell this clearly at its website? Why you have to make this limitation: "which on the email side is correct"?

Sadly enough that someone has to provoke a little bit to get an answer by an official, the answer isnt much satisfying though. You know that your marketing team is not far from lying with this kind of phrasing at your websites? At least its misleading. There is no clear statement that no other client than your webclient is able to work nativly with your software? And no other clients than outlook and evolution with your connectors?

So i've been taken in by the words of your marketing team. Thats frustrating, but partly i have to blame myself to believe in marketing bubbles.

regards, Jens

[florian]

Jens,

I do care quite a bit what we say about our product as I"m a tech person with a role (Director of Product Management) that naturally has a connection to the marketing team. Therefore, I personally stand behind those statements.

All I can say is that this has been time-tested, no customer has complained or has been misleaded by this statement in over 3 years. I'm sorry to hear that this wasn't the case for you. I'll forward this statement to our VP Marketing and she'll certainly recheck and balance it again.

A thing such as IMAP calendaring simply doesn't exist.

As for response times, please not that we have a technical support department, that, once you purchase support incidents, responds to questions under SLA. Same is true when you work with our sales team and field people.

Response here on the forum is done by many scalix employees, a lot of them go into the forum on their spare time. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do so sometimes there can be a backlog. I rarely pick up threads in here myself these days due to overall workload.

Sorry it didn't work for you,
Florian.

[jennix]

For the rest of all users which are working with KDE/Kontact i recommend to not use Kontact/KOrganizer, because it seems to be untested, not fully working and can destroy all calendaring data in your Scalix-Environment. (Maybe you can state at leats this at your website)

regards, Jens

[jennix]

A thing such as IMAP calendaring simply doesn't exist.

It doesnt matter how you name it. If Kontact/KOrganizer is using Imap-Mails with calendar-data to get it into its own calendar and sends Imap-Messages to put calendar-data to other calendars, then i name it Imap-calendaring.

As for response times, please not that we have a technical support department, that, once you purchase support incidents, responds to questions under SLA. Same is true when you work with our sales team and field people.

Response here on the forum is done by many scalix employees, a lot of them go into the forum on their spare time. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do so sometimes there can be a backlog. I rarely pick up threads in here myself these days due to overall workload.

Dont get me wrong. I'm a software developer for myself and i'm working for several companies and also for my own company. I know how much work someone can have in this field. So i was waiting for a response to my first mail in this thread about 2 weeks without moaning.

But I also know these sentences with "commercial support...employees are helping at their spare time..." and so on. And it doesnt impress me much, because your company is getting very, very much back from the community. I believe without giving your software as opensource to the community you wouldnt have your software in the same state as it is.

regards, Jens

[piero]

Just came across this thread while searching for "kontact" on the forums. Here are my 0.02 €:

When I came across scalix the frist time (some months or maybe one year ago) I decided to take some time having a deeper look at it. First look was very promising. After _much_ reading I found out that there is no support except for evolution and outlook.

Since your web client may be good and award winning - it does not run with konqueror the last time I checked (did not try with safari, but its based on the same engine).
Searching for a good standard-based groupware, Scalix was a big disappointment.

Looking after something that can replace open-xchange I had to realize that Scalix cant.

We do need something that works with OS X, KDE and Windows. (and not just email - imap alone is nothing interesting. lots of simple oss servers can do this very basic job).

I strongly suggest the Scalix team to look after this kind of things. With KDE4 this environment will get even more important than it already is.

Just posted this because I think this kind of feedback is important for you.

All I can say is that this has been time-tested, no customer has complained or has been misleaded by this statement in over 3 years.

Just because no one registers at the forums to complain when he realizes that scalix is not for them - it does not say much. I "checked back" to see if scalix has been coming to a point useable to us - and crossed this thread by accident. Never would have complained about this otherwise.

[dougp23]

We do need something that works with OS X, KDE and Windows. (and not just email - imap alone is nothing interesting. lots of simple oss servers can do this very basic job).

I look at it differently. I say the OS doesn't matter too much anymore. Yes, it REALLY does in some cases (certain apps will never be ported to Mac or Linux, so you're stuck) but with the advent of Ajax and Rich Web Clients, the OS certainly loses its importance.

If you want a great email/calendaring/contacts application, Scalix Web Access is an excellent choice. Just run Firefox on Win/Lin/Mac, and you have all the features. I remain steadfast (as I expressed elsewhere in these forums) in my belief that Outlook is an unqualified POS. When I rememeber the "I Love You" virus, that thing would have done NOTHING if we all were reading mail in our browsers.

Just my 2 cents. Your mileage will obviously vary.

[racmar]

doug,

I can't agree more! Also, I have seen that zimbra is creating a "desktop" application. I think it is nothing more than AJAX and an offline mail-cache ( similar to scalix's smartcache ). The beauty of this is true cross-platform offline access to your email that looks exactly like the native web client. What a great idea, but who knows how it will work in reality.

Here is hoping that scalix will adopt the solution ( maybe /w version 12? ).

[piero]

sorry, but i can not agree. a web client is not as integrated into the os than a native application. that is per design.

it begins with offline browsing. however i do not know what this smartcache is all about - maybe this is a solution.

what is about desktop search? my mails will not be searched by spotlight, google desktop, beagle, strigi, etc.

what is about a nice way to show me new mails. a browser is not able to dock into my systray and give me informations about how many new mails arrived. (there are workarounds - but they are just that, workarounds. i have seen windows that pop up, etc ...)

there is no possibility for other programs to access my mails (this is related to desktop search, but there are other use cases as well.

last point i want to bring up is the attachement handling of web clients. i hate it. if you work with a lot of attachements (ie patches or things like that) its really not that comfortable.

i really dislike this ajax hype. a browser is no application framework. what i really want to see is a nice java client - it could solve all my needs. it runs on all platforms, you could even access it with your web browser if you like.

we already have great technologies to build cross platform clients - we do not need this ajax-things _everywhere_. (however, for mail clients its not that bad after all - but not for everyday use).

if you try to build a desktop application in the browser because its platform independent I wonder why not use something that is designed for that? Why not simply build a client with java?

I really believe that this is the way to go. But thats my oppinion only and this thread shows that there are different views.

[edit: glow is very similar to what i think will be the perfect groupware. however, it is in very early stage.
-> http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow/
]