[horde] Suggestions for improvements

[Jan Schneider]

Hello Gautier,

Zitat von Gautier HUSSON <gautier.husson at liberasys.com>:

> Hello Jan,
>
> Since March, I go forward in order to propose google and exchange
> alternative to my customers.
> Horde is still the best choice for me. But I have some ideas to improve
> your product.
>
> 1) User interface
> Although you improved it, the UI is not at the level of concurrent
> solutions. Look at :
> http://www.zentyal.com/zentyal-server/
> https://www.zimbra.com/products/secure-collaboration-tools-overview
> I think you could spend a little money to a webdesigner to improve it.
> If I manage to get a good contract with Horde, I will try to sell a
> design part and reverse it to the community.

To be honest, I don't see how we fall back behind those examples that  
you provided. Despite having a darker default theme for Horde, the UI  
of all three clients are pretty similar.

> 2) Colors
> Colors are generated randomly (ex : for calendars). This leads to sad
> colors. You may improve it.
> Example : play with : http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/
> Play with values like :
> H : 0-360
> C : 1.65-3
> L : 0.7-1.2
> Making a PHP algorithm for generating colors within those parameters
> would not be difficult.

This is an interesting idea and definitely worth the approach. Please  
file a request at bugs.horde.org. I'm not perfectly happy with the  
range of colors provided by the settings that you suggested, but this  
could of course be fine tuned.

> 3) Default presets
> Default presets for users are difficult to set (or maybe I didn't find
> the right way). You could improve it. Example : in administration menu,
> create profiles templates that you can set to user groups or any new
> user ?

I don't think they are really so difficult to set, even though it  
requires some basic PHP knowledge. The flipside is, that using PHP  
configuration files allows for much more flexibility than UI driven  
settings.
But of course there is always room for improvement, and providing a UI  
for settings those defaults doesn't completely rule out the usage of  
PHP configuration files.

> At last, I spend 3 weeks making a good stand-alone server install. Some
> parts are in french but still, it can help.
> http://www.liberasys.com/wiki/doku.php?id=infrastructure:infrastructure
> (license : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

Great, you could link to it from the Howto section of our wiki!

> Best regards,
> And thank you to continue the Horde project as full free software (you
> are to my knowledge the last ones at this functional level) !
> Gautier HUSSON


-- 
Jan Schneider
The Horde Project
http://www.horde.org/