On 26.06.2013 17:28, Wayland Sothcott wrote:
> On 26/06/2013 14:42, Miles Lott wrote:
>> If it were not for the desire and in some cases the actual need for
>> Outlook, then reverse engineering would not be necessary.  As an
>> alternative, if there were another client that would allow for
>> connection to Sharepoint calendars and would also allow for the use of
>> existing third party Outlook plugins, then we could use that.
>>
>> If you do not need Outlook, then the web interface or Thunderbird
>> (with its plugins) is enough.  Of course, working with Thunderbird and
>> its issues requires some reverse engineering as well - or at least
>> patience.
> 
> It sounds like I am coming at the problem backwards. Outlook is a
> popular and competent email client but if I found another one my
> customers would use that. There used to be a little address book and
> calendar that looked like a filofax, it was fantastic and could even
> share it's file over the network so several people could use it. This
> was discontinued rather than developed further. I rather feel that the
> lack of a simple solution to this common and simple problem is
> deliberate. Novel Netware was very reliable but the corporation I worked
> for migrated away from this to TCP/IP which I did not understand at the
> time. The same corporation moved away from Lotus Notes to Microsoft
> Exchange and I have never understood.
> 
> I am becoming convinced that the way to solve this problem is to ignore
> the existing 'solutions' such as any Thunderbird plugins or MS Exchange
> or LDAP and create a very simple protocol.

Why are you constantly repeating yourself all over the mailing list? As
mentioned, oh, a dozen times, those simple protocols already /exist/.

Namely Card- and CalDAV.

The Thunderbird plugins (or Android apps) just add those sync protocols
to the existing calendar/address book; Apple iCal and Contacts.app, for
example, can already be used natively.

The Exchange Bloatware is only necessary because there is no decent way
to integrate Outlook into a sane setup.
Sogo uses LDAP (or Samba) because it aims at companies actually big
enough to require them, there are more lightweight address book/calendar
sync solutions building on Cal/CardDAV that can be used without a
central domain (Owncloud and Davical, if I'm not mistaken). Again, with
the same client infrastructure as the SOGo Server – SOGo Connector for
Thunderbird, iCal/Contacts.app, Cal/CardDAVSync (Android), …

> Then people can create the
> plugins for the email clients and the web interface and the backend
> server database interface etc to their hearts content.

They already do.

> No one has to try and pretend to be MS Exchange.

Outlook is the sole exception. Sadly, it's a rather huge and (for many)
important one.

>>
>> On 06/26/2013 07:35 AM, Wayland Sothcott wrote:
>>>    Hello Raymond,
>>>
>>> I sympathise with you but also with the SOGo team. There is an
>>> obvious hole in what you can do with a Linux server. It's not
>>> necessarily that it does not act as an Exchange server but that the
>>> functionality of an email server beyond simply sending and receiving
>>> emails using Internet standards is missing.
>>>
>>> Microsoft protocols are usually very complicated, The SAMBA team have
>>> done fantastically well to make it work like Microsoft NT Server. The
>>> SOGo team are trying to do this for Exchange.
>>>
>>> What should happen is a set of open standards should be written.
>>> These would define how the client and the server talk to each other
>>> to handle address book data and calendar data.
>>> The server could then store it's data in whatever database suits it.
>>> This might be the companies own database or one which came with the
>>> service. The client could be an ipad or MS Outlook or Thunderbird.
>>> Whatever, no matter since this standard would be added to the client
>>> just like IMAP or POP is currently.
>>>
>>> Trying to reverse engineer a Microsoft product is a bit sad. It's all
>>> reflected glory. Open Office is like this. I could go on...
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Wayland.
>>>
>>
>>
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> 

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