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