[H-GEN] In office scheduling program...
Martin Pool
mbp at linuxcare.com.au
Wed May 31 03:04:45 EDT 2000
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On Wed, 31 May 2000, Andrew Draper wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm interested in setting up a small network for 4 - 8 people, and
> wish to run some kind of appointment book thingo.
Some people at Linuxcare are working on an open calendering server. It's
only in alpha, and perhaps overkill for 4-8 people, but still interesting.
I'm sure they'd appreciate contributions whether as suggestions,
encouragement or code.
--
Martin Pool, Linuxcare, Inc.
+61 2 6262 8990
mbp at linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.
>From setuid at linuxcare.com Wed May 31 17:02:12 2000
Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 10:02:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: David A. Desrosiers <setuid at linuxcare.com>
To: Spam <spam-l at linuxcare.com>
Subject: Re: GPL Calendar and email....
> This is some stuff that OpenFlock and GCTP (Group Calendaring
> Transport Protocol) do. As Evolution evolves, it shouldn't be too
> hard to make the Evolution calendar a GCTP client for the additional
> functionality.
>
> This all assumes that I can get the GCTP spec and the first release
> of OpenFlock out the door soon... :-/
Take a peek at what I found inside the Evolution docs:
-- 8< ----------- snip ------------------------------------------------
2000-01-17 Federico Mena Quintero <federico at helixcode.com>
The files from the gncal directory of the gnome-pim module on
CVS were moved here, to evolution/calendar, in preparation for
the Evolution work. The calendar is being split into a
model/view (PAS): it provides storage, notification, and event
generation; the views/controllers are the calendar user agents
and things like Pilot synchronizers.
-- 8< ----------- snip ------------------------------------------------
>From dan at linuxcare.com Wed May 31 17:02:12 2000
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 12:23:59 +0930 (CST)
From: Dan Shearer <dan at linuxcare.com>
To: Daniel J. O'Neill <djoneill at linuxcare.com>
Cc: tech at lists.linuxcare.com
Subject: Re: Open source Exchange Server replacement?
[moved from spam-l, I presume that's the right thing to do]
On Thu, 18 May 2000, Daniel J. O'Neill wrote:
> i do know about OpenFlock, but i was thinking specifically of a
> Samba-type Exchange Server emulator for calendaring (only for the
> calendaring part, not for the smtp and pop). this area
> (enterprise-infrastructure) seems to be Linux's forte.
1. It's partly the lack of standards, or rather, a calendar transport
standard. This reputedly to do with the presence of particular
companies on the committees developing this transport (Lotus and Microsoft
especially.) So aside from various web-based solutions, calendaring
systems are impossible to implement in a standardised way. The
ICAP draft protocol is the best we've got, and the only decent
implementation I've seen is a library, and the only serious use of that
is called from PHP. I think there is a very early version of a GTK+
app that uses it.
Does anyone know of anything further in this field?
2. Regarding Exchange, specifically if there is a constraint that one end
or the other has to be Microsoft...
Luke Leighton has this far-fetched idea that he's going to implement
a complete set of Exchange MSRPC functionality, both client and server.
Howevever his implementation of the ntdom MSRPC gear was equally
far fetched, and that's working rather well! This would
give the ability for, say, mutt to read mail from an MS Exchange server
and for Outlook Express to use Linux as an MS Exchange server. Expect
an enthusiastic followup from Luke to this message :-)
If you can do Exchange mail you can do calendaring.
3. Then there is the HP Openmail approach, which simply replaces MAPI.DLL
on the client side with something which speaks a simple protocol
to the HP server containing the same (very simple) message content.
All Exchange calendaring is done with straightforward mail messages.
Writing a stub MAPI.DLL (a truly open one, not HP's approach) is not
a hard job if you like Win32 programming.
Dan
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>From dsifry at linuxcare.com Wed May 31 17:02:12 2000
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 02:47:13 -0700
From: David L. Sifry <dsifry at linuxcare.com>
To: spam-l at lists.linuxcare.com
Subject: OpenFlock-0.9alpha1 released! (Open Source Group Calendaring
System)
I'm proud to announce the first public release of a group calendaring
system I've been working on (in my copious spare time, heh) called
OpenFlock. OpenFlock is designed with a client-server architecture,
similar to the way that email works. Much in the same way that email
uses SMTP as its transport protocol, OpenFlock uses GCTP (Group
Calendaring Transport Protocol) to communicate between clients and
servers. It is licensed under the GPL. See the README and
doc/protocol.txt for more details.
Right now, OpenFlock is in ALPHA testing - that means that it has bugs,
unimplemented features, and it may still undergo significant
architectural changes. It does, however, really work - included in the
package is a functional GCTP server as well as a number of GCTP clients
(all text-based for now) that demonstrate the capabilities of the group
calendaring system. It's not pretty, however. In the spirit of good
open source development, I'm following the "release early, release
often" model. If you're not a programmer, it is probably best if you
want until the beta code comes out in order to actually do something
useful with OpenFlock.
At this stage, it is ready to have other people look at the code, write
other clients, like web-based group calendaring (Rasmus?), Palm Pilot
Support (Dave D.?), start to formalize the protocol (Dave M.?), and in
general beat all of the pasty-faced bugs out of the code.
So, if this is something that interests you, you can get the alpha code
from: <http://www.sifry.com/openflock-0.9alpha1.tar.gz>
or from CVS: :pserver:cvs at www.sifry.com:/cvsroot (password is cvs, the
project name is openflock)
In case you're not interested in installing the server code on your
local computer, I have a computer at Linuxcare dedicated to acting as an
OpenFlock server: openflock.i.linuxcare.com. Note that this box is
inside of Linuxcare's firewall, but you should be able to access the box
if you have VPN access. This way, all you have to do is install the
GCTP modules and then tell the clients to point themselves at
openflock.i.linuxcare.com instead of localhost.
When we get the kinks worked out of Linuxcare's CVS repository, we'll
move the code there, as well as put the project code up on our web site,
and set up some mailing lists...
If you have any problems with OpenFlock, let me know at
dsifry at linuxcare.com.
Dave
--
Dave Sifry, Chief Technology Officer
Linuxcare, Inc.
415.354.4236 tel, 415.701.7457 fax
dsifry at linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.
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