Dear SOGo developers and users,
In my company we are currently evaluating groupware solutions for a
mixed client environment. Having to deal with about 40 users of Outlook,
Thunderbird, iOS and/or Android (and all of them being little die-hards,
of course ;), we are following the development of SOGo very closely.
Therefore, we have set up a SOGo test installation and found the
CalDAV/CardDAV support for Thunderbird, iOS and Android to work really
smoothly. We love SOGo's simplicity and light-weight solution and how
well it integrates with our existing server environment. Thanks for that
and keep up the good work!
Unfortunately, we also found its native Outlook support to be still
rather shaky so that we couldn't recommend it yet to our Outlook users
for productive use.
However, as SOGo's native Outlook support sounds very promising, we
would like to stick to SOGo and wait for things to become more stable.
In the meantime, we planned to apply a workaround: have SOGo as a mere
CalDAV/CardDAV server and use Outlook in combination with a
CalDAV/CardDAV plugin, e.g. Bynari's WebDAV Collaborator or iCAL4OL.
Unfortunately, we encountered the same problem that had already been
reported by Merijn Visser in February: double invitation emails in Outlook:
https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists/arc/users/2013-02/msg00006.html
To solve the issue, we tried the following two SOGo options:
1. "SOGoAppointmentSendEMailNotifications" set to "YES" (standard behavior):
This works well with clients like Thunderbird and SOGo's web interface
that rely solely on the SOGo back-end to send out invitation emails.
Outlook, however, insists on directly sending invitations itself unless
we forced our Outlook users to follow an unfamiliar, non-standard
process (which we want to avoid by all means). Hence, as soon as the
CalDAV plugin synchronizes invitation calendar entries from the local
Outlook calendar to the SOGo back-end, the latter sends out a redundant
(and confusing) email notification to invitees.
2. "SOGoAppointmentSendEMailNotifications" set to "NO":
Here, the situation is fine for Outlook users whereas users of
Thunderbird, SOGo's web interface etc. cannot send out any invitations
anymore.
So, with neither of these options can we satisfy all of our users.
Has this issue already been tackled and solved? If so, could somebody
point me briefly to the solution that I seem to have missed? If not, are
there any plans to remedy this issue?
As solution, the implementation of the Scheduling Extension to CalDAV
(RFC 6638), i.e. respecting "SCHEDULE-AGENT=CLIENT" had been proposed:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6638#section-7.1
My understanding is that it would solve the above problem if both the
CalDAV plugin (front-end) and the SOGo server (back-end) respected this
CalDAV extension in a reasonable way.
Are there any plans from the SOGo developers team to implement this
feature in near future? I could image that many users/companies are
placed in the same position as we are and would welcome such a
workaround/solution.
Thanks in advance and Best Regards,
John
--
[email protected]
https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
