[horde] collaboration within imap

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Jim Guiltinan <jim at abwhost.net>:

> I was going to suggest the following, as I use IMP in my small web hosting
> business, but then when I visited today horde's web site, I see they already
> have groupware - which looks great and I've just asked my linux consultant
> what it would take to replace IMP with groupware web  edition.
>
> What I was going to suggest is a simple collaboration design, where email
> messages are considered database "records," all within imap.  This would
> require modification of an email program such as thunderbird, or creation of
> a new email program, for those who like to work both in webmail and outside
> of webmail.  A design where when you schedule an appointment in your
> calendar, it gets sent as an email message with a special tag in it telling
> IMP and any compatible IMAP email program that the email message is a
> calendar record, and if a group is involved, carbon copies of the message go
> to group members' mailboxes.

This is called iTip, for task and calendaring, and vCards, for  
contacts. vNote is less prevalent but notes are basically plain text  
emails anyway.

> Same for contacts, tasks and notes.  I would guess this would mean that
> contacts are one imap folder, tasks and notes have their own imap folders.
> But the interface would display records (email messages) in these folders
> not as email folders but appropriate displays such as calendar display.  It
> may be that for notes and tasks, standard email folders work.
>
> Would it fly?  Or is it not needed since we have groupware web edition now?

Horde has had contact, task, calendar, and note based collaboration,  
with shared calendars, tasklists, etc. - "groupware" - for years now.  
The groupware bundles are a great thing but they are really a nice  
installation wrapper around existing functionality.

If you really want to store all this data in your IMAP server, I'd  
suggest using Kolab.

-chuck