Hey, folks. Just wanted to take another shot at one of my oldest windmills :)
So, we talked about calendaring for a long time. Then we picked Zarafa. Then we kind of implemented it. Then no-one used it, and we took it out again: http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2011/02/resetting-expectations-fedora.html
That wasn't what you might call a 'success', I know. I think there's maybe a couple of reasons for that. One, I'm still not really sure why we'd pick Zarafa. It's explicitly designed to be a Microsoft Exchange replacement, and I don't think Fedora is a project with a lot of people who really need to use ActiveSync or Outlook, so...huh? It just doesn't seem like it was ever a great fit. By the Zarafa page on the wiki - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zarafa - we couldn't even ship Z-Push because ActiveSync is patented, so apparently our only ever official calendaring system never had a working sync mechanism at all, and I don't think Zarafa's web interface is any great shakes.
Two, there was never any particular driver towards using it.
So, I think another try with a more appropriate calendaring system - if we can find one - and a 'seed' use of it might be a good idea.
I've been using eGroupware, personally, for quite a while, and I think it's a good system. I'm not aware of any major barriers to including it in Fedora. It has internal copies of a few Pear modules, but that's pretty small beer and it should be trivial to use the system-wide copies or get an exception (some of them are extensively modified). It has a nice web UI and decent sync capabilities via CalDAV: I've used it synchronized with Evolution on two systems and never had major problems. It seems at least a better fit than Zarafa. Citadel would be another one to look at.
As for a 'seed' use, I think an ideal fit here would be the release schedules. Currently, these are dumb HTML tables with ICS files living in the current release manager's personal fedoraproject space:
http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/
which sucks for any number of reasons, not least of which you need to know who the hell the release manager is at the moment in order to find the schedule. =) Using a proper calendaring system would seem to be a far better way to handle the release calendars, and would be a great kickstarter for a project calendaring system. Since the calendars are maintained by one person, we only need to get one person (hi, Robyn!) to buy in, in order to kick off this seed use.
To restrict the liability issues mentioned in Smooge's blog post, we could not enable the email function of the system we choose (this is possible with both EGW and Citadel). We could also not have individual accounts for all Fedora project members, at least at first: we could have just a few individual accounts with commit access, mainly for the release manager to maintain the calendars, and then have a single read-only guest account which people could use to view the calendars and sync them read-only to their phones and desktop clients. It may even be possible to set things up so people can view and read-only sync without any authentication required.
What do people think of this idea? If it seems like an approach that's simpler to maintain and more likely to produce actual useful results, that'd be great. I'm willing to work on packaging eGroupware and resolving the private-copies-of-pear-modules issue - I already maintain eGW for Mandriva, so it wouldn't be too much work to convert the spec to Fedora standards.
On 28/07/11 23:18, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hey, folks. Just wanted to take another shot at one of my oldest windmills :)
So, we talked about calendaring for a long time. Then we picked Zarafa. Then we kind of implemented it. Then no-one used it, and we took it out again: http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2011/02/resetting-expectations-fedora.html
That wasn't what you might call a 'success', I know. I think there's maybe a couple of reasons for that. One, I'm still not really sure why we'd pick Zarafa. It's explicitly designed to be a Microsoft Exchange replacement, and I don't think Fedora is a project with a lot of people who really need to use ActiveSync or Outlook, so...huh? It just doesn't seem like it was ever a great fit. By the Zarafa page on the wiki - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zarafa - we couldn't even ship Z-Push because ActiveSync is patented, so apparently our only ever official calendaring system never had a working sync mechanism at all, and I don't think Zarafa's web interface is any great shakes.
Two, there was never any particular driver towards using it.
So, I think another try with a more appropriate calendaring system - if we can find one - and a 'seed' use of it might be a good idea.
I've been using eGroupware, personally, for quite a while, and I think it's a good system. I'm not aware of any major barriers to including it in Fedora. It has internal copies of a few Pear modules, but that's pretty small beer and it should be trivial to use the system-wide copies or get an exception (some of them are extensively modified). It has a nice web UI and decent sync capabilities via CalDAV: I've used it synchronized with Evolution on two systems and never had major problems. It seems at least a better fit than Zarafa. Citadel would be another one to look at.
As for a 'seed' use, I think an ideal fit here would be the release schedules. Currently, these are dumb HTML tables with ICS files living in the current release manager's personal fedoraproject space:
http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/
which sucks for any number of reasons, not least of which you need to know who the hell the release manager is at the moment in order to find the schedule. =) Using a proper calendaring system would seem to be a far better way to handle the release calendars, and would be a great kickstarter for a project calendaring system. Since the calendars are maintained by one person, we only need to get one person (hi, Robyn!) to buy in, in order to kick off this seed use.
To restrict the liability issues mentioned in Smooge's blog post, we could not enable the email function of the system we choose (this is possible with both EGW and Citadel). We could also not have individual accounts for all Fedora project members, at least at first: we could have just a few individual accounts with commit access, mainly for the release manager to maintain the calendars, and then have a single read-only guest account which people could use to view the calendars and sync them read-only to their phones and desktop clients. It may even be possible to set things up so people can view and read-only sync without any authentication required.
What do people think of this idea? If it seems like an approach that's simpler to maintain and more likely to produce actual useful results, that'd be great. I'm willing to work on packaging eGroupware and resolving the private-copies-of-pear-modules issue - I already maintain eGW for Mandriva, so it wouldn't be too much work to convert the spec to Fedora standards.
If you don't advertise something , nobody will use it! When was this made available to everyone ? I never heard anything, I always assumed this was infra internal.
Maybe that is the problem here ?
Maybe I missed it being advertised, if so, I apologise.
Regards,
Tristan
On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:27:01 +0100 Tristan Santore tristan.santore@internexusconnect.net wrote:
If you don't advertise something , nobody will use it! When was this made available to everyone ? I never heard anything, I always assumed this was infra internal.
Maybe that is the problem here ?
Maybe I missed it being advertised, if so, I apologise.
No, it's not been widely advertised, as we haven't decided it meets our needs or is something we wish to keep supporting. ;)
I'm going to get it upgraded to 7.0.0 and then we can all re-evaluate if it meets a need and we wish to support it.
kevin
Well, here's where we are I think...
1. zarafa 7.0.0 just came out a bit ago. I think this might have the ability to disable all but the calendar mode and might provide a more useful sync function set. So, I was going to upgrade our zarafa to that version when I got a chance.
Which does indeed still exist: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/zarafa/
I agree that it doesn't seem to match up with all our needs for calendaring, so it might not pass this and we retire it out.
2. The insight folks have been looking at making a calendar module for insight that we could use. (drupal based): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight_use_cases_for_calendar So, that was looking like it might be an option.
I guess we should really move back a step here. We have:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Calendar_Project
Which we should really clean up and update to what we NEED and what we would LIKE to have and then see what actual thing meets those criteria and run with it.
I'd hate for us to implement too many more things before actually knowing what we want/need.
Thoughts?
kevin
On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 16:32 -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Well, here's where we are I think...
- zarafa 7.0.0 just came out a bit ago. I think this might have the
ability to disable all but the calendar mode and might provide a more useful sync function set. So, I was going to upgrade our zarafa to that version when I got a chance.
Which does indeed still exist: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/zarafa/
I agree that it doesn't seem to match up with all our needs for calendaring, so it might not pass this and we retire it out.
Sounds cool. I'll take a look. I think it might take a bit to get over my worry about Zarafa - it is, after all, explicitly designed to be an open core, cheaper Exchange replacement for Exchange shops. But then eGW is also open core-ish, although its open source version is stable, mature, and does what we need (and really a lot more than we need).
- The insight folks have been looking at making a calendar module for
insight that we could use. (drupal based): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight_use_cases_for_calendar So, that was looking like it might be an option.
Interesting! I hadn't heard about that. Will look at it.
I guess we should really move back a step here. We have:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Calendar_Project
Which we should really clean up and update to what we NEED and what we would LIKE to have and then see what actual thing meets those criteria and run with it.
Sounds good. I think quite a bit of that is still accurate, but I don't think FAS authentication is really required (especially in the 'just a few people with write access' scenario I suggested), and I'd like to have sync made a 'must have', especially since so many people use phones these days. It needs to be sync rather than one-time import/export, because if we delay the release, we'd wind up with a mess unless the calendars are actually _synced_.
I'd hate for us to implement too many more things before actually knowing what we want/need.
Thoughts?
Sounds good. I'll make a note on my todo to take a look at the zarafa instance when it's updated, check out that drupal module, and propose a revision to the 'requirements' list.
On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:02:17 -0700 Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
...snip...
Sounds good. I'll make a note on my todo to take a look at the zarafa instance when it's updated, check out that drupal module, and propose a revision to the 'requirements' list.
I've just updated zarafa to 7.0.0.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/zarafa/
Please do play around with it and see if it meets our needs. I will try and do likewise sometime this week.
kevin
On Mon, 1 Aug 2011 11:27:58 -0400 "Adam M. Dutko" dutko.adam@gmail.com wrote:
I logged in around 3-5 minutes ago and the panels are still loading. :-/
Try again now.
There was a stuck server process from before the upgrade around.
It seems to be working fine for me now at least.
kevin
On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 15:18:38 -0700, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
kickstarter for a project calendaring system. Since the calendars are maintained by one person, we only need to get one person (hi, Robyn!) to buy in, in order to kick off this seed use.
If it's just Robyn's calendars you want to read, you can use the ics files directly. I have the release calanders directly referenced by thunderbird-lightning and they work just fine. I don't think we really need a server for that. (But we do for other things.)
I am pretty sure I saw a news article about another open source calendar this week. I'll try to find it and report back.
On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 07:53:20 -0500, Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
I am pretty sure I saw a news article about another open source calendar this week. I'll try to find it and report back.
I wasn't able to find this.
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