to date, management was done via a web interface. this was an improvement for many over the command line but it can still be funky trying to manage a kolab installation with 1000s of users via a web interface. it's not as fast is it could be and adding people (or removing them) from distribution lists isn't much fun.
enter Tobias Koenig, a name familiar to anyone who's been around kde for a while, and his new baby kolabadmin. kolabadmin is a native graphical application manage your kolab servers. it is a qt4 app released under the GPL, so it runs on your platform of choice and is open source.
once logged in you get a pretty window showing your options:
which gives you access to things like the distribution list manager:
in any listing dialog, one can apply a filter to the list (perfect when you have have more than a few dozen entries, which is typical of a production email environment) and when modifying things like distribution lists you can filter then select all the people you want. it's fast and convenient, though the web based admin makes a great fallback for those times you aren't in front of your own computer.
so how do you get kolabadmin? it's currently available via svn at svn://wgess16.dyndns.org/kolabadmin/trunk. after an svn co, simply do a qmake && make. a few minutes later you have a high powered admin tool.
this really raises the expectation bar for open source groupware servers. and for that, i owe you a beer Tobias =)
8 comments:
What about accessibility? The html based list and the url 'buttons' seem hard to reach with the keyboard.
Why would you want to use a webbased list instead of just a ListView?
This may be off-topic, but is that window decoration theme available for KDE 3.5 and if so, where can I download it?
accessibility: i agree. i've been talking to tobias about some UI tweaks here and there (and sent him 296 line patch last night that he applied today). it's a work in progress no doubt, but the important thing is that it works.
you can make something that doesn't exist (or work) accessible. so please, download the code and play with it. make it better. tobias is totally open to improvements.
window deco: it's the one that comes with kubuntu as the default. apparently it's called "crystal".
Next year, Kolab should apply to the Google Summer of Code as an independent project. I'm sure they'll get a few projects accepted.
Looks wonderful and is exactly what's needed. Perhaps integration into the Control Centre would be a good idea as well?
Despite my dislike for groupware servers in general I do like Kolab.
Concerning accessibility, you can use Tab to move between the single links and Enter to activate them.
Why not a listview? Well, listviews look boring... is this an acceptable answer? :)
Ciao,
Tobias
I'm taking the devil's advocate here.
You have got to be kidding me.
Why write this as a qt4 app. instead of optimizing the existing web-based console? Turn it into a AJAX thingy and do prefetching in the background. Or send less data.
Now tobias has to maintain a separate app (instead of improving the existing one) and it would even run on a non-qt4 platform => few people will use it. Hell, improve konqi to run javascript faster. (JIT or inline conversion of JS->native bytecode) It would be more general and you'd get the same result in the long run.
Ben
> Why write this as a qt4 app.
> instead of optimizing the
> existing web-based console
have you ever managed multiple kolab installations each with 1,000's of users and dozens of distribution lists?
it was probably just as fast (or faster) to write this app as it would've been to buzzword, er, ajax-ify the kolab web interface and it still wouldn't be as fast or as convenient.
the web browser isn't the ultimate interface.
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