KDE for Enterprise Needs a Strong PIM Infrastructure
14 points by bport
14 points by bport
I work in a big enterprise and we all use gsuite apps in the browser. Accessing e-mail/calendar any other way is simply disabled/disallowed. I think that is very common and I don't see a resurgance of desktop mail and surrounding tech. People have moved on.
From the article, this is related to the KDE Sovereign Tech Fund, so this seems to be about giving options for organizations that cannot delegate all their digital services to an American company.
So while gsuite may be convenient and may have 'won' critical mindshare, for political reasons it may be unviable for some orgs and this initiative is to suit those orgs, which I think is a respectable tract for work.
Not all companies disallow it (even though I agree with you that more and more are going this way), and we don't only have our company email to manage.
A desktop client has huge advantages from my point of view: a central place to access all my email inboxes with a vendor-agnostic interface (I don't have to deal with different web UIs), and it works seamlessly offline.
And it's the same for calendars, having all calendars in one place allows better organization. For example, when you're working for multiple customers, you can instantly see if there's a collision between events... without having to open many web pages and do the aggregation mentally.
I guess the irony here is that the solution to have everything in one place for some orgs is simply to use Google or another provider for everything.
One aspect might be that centrally managed provisioning of local desktop clients still isn't trivial in many orgs. Especially for desktops AND mobile devices. Centralized accounts for everything work around that.
Yes but there is case where you want to handle more than one account (e.g. your company emails and your customer email if you are doing services)
Agreed. Most "enterprise" GSuite orgs I've seen (and I've been the admin of one myself) have always disabled IMAP access. I get that this post is in the context of EU Sovereignty, but I don't think the way to be successful in that is to recreate Active Directory style setups but not Microsoft. I've never even heard of some of the protocols or the IMAP extension mentioned in this piece. I'd focus on modern protocols and building EU native version of those
If IMAP is disabled, why would other protocols be allowed? (Note, IMAP is already capable of using oauth+tls, so there's not a security argument there)
Has Akonadi improved much since its debut? I remember it was a UX horror show in the KDE 4 era.
I just remember the problems with the local mysql instance. Maybe it was too soon for sqlite but it always was a weird choice.
Akonadi as an idea has a great UX in that you don't notice in exists: it just handles accounts and synching as you would expect, and you never touch it. In practice with mail I found it crashing very frequently; with calendar only it worked fine
That certainly wasn't the case in the KDE 4 era, where it asked you to set up a MySQL server (as wink mentioned).