Results from the Kolab Sprint in Berlin

This week members of the Kolab Community met in Berlin for some very productive face to face work on the upcoming release of Kolab 3.0 alpha. Developers from ownCloud, Roundcube, KDE, Cyrus IMAP, Fedora, and of course Kolab sat together for one week, discussed, hacked and celebrated. Employees of Kolab Systems used the opportunity to meet with several business partners and a usability expert provided some valuable input that will be used to make Kolab clients more user friendly.

The Syncroton maintainer assisted Kolab developers to finish the integration of a brand new mobile synchronisation framework for Kolab 3.0. The Kolab  backend was ported to a new API, many bugs were fixed, the synchronisation performance was  significantly improved and all essential features are finished.

Roundcube already being the default Web-Client for the Kolab Groupware had two developers present. They put finishing touches on the new skin that improves the look of Roundcube enormously. Also, the groupware functionality of Roundcube is now feature complete, since it is able to handle tasks. But for coming versions of Kolab, there were plenty of ideas for new exciting features.

The developers of ownCloud including the maintainer and founder Frank Karlitschek came to Berlin to help to integrate ownCloud into the Kolab web client. A basic integration was completed. ownCloud can now be shipped, installed and configured alongside Kolab. They can even share the same user directory based on LDAP. There were several lively discussions on how to integrate ownCloud even more seamlessly which resulted in many ideas and tasks that will be worked on in the coming weeks after the sprint.

Several minor technical problems have been solved during the sprint. These include the management of resources such as cars by Kolab. People can reserve them on a first come first serve basis. After the sprint  there is still some potential for performance improvements when resolving conflicts with thousands of resources. Another technical detail that was resolved is integration into openldap that now works as well as with the 389 Directory Server. The free/busy daemon is now feature-complete and overall configuration management. Unfortunately, the planned work on native packages for common GNU/Linux distributions did not happen, since nobody from these communities was present. We are still welcoming and supporting any packaging efforts that are developing.

Overall, it was a great event. Some people met for the first time, had many beers together and got to know each other so well that future collaboration will benefit a great deal. The Kolab community would to like to especially thank KDAB for providing the office space and refreshments for the Sprint. We are all looking forward to meet each other at the next Kolab event which will hopefully happen soon.