[turba] Automatic free/busy urls for kronolith in generated "group" adressbooks

Jan Schneider jan at horde.org
Fri Oct 16 08:43:47 UTC 2009


Zitat von "Michael J. Rubinsky" <mrubinsk at horde.org>:

> Quoting Johannes Boy <johannesboy at web.de>:
>
>> Michael J. Rubinsky schrieb:
>>> Quoting Johannes Boy <johannesboy at web.de>:
>> [...]
>>> Still not really sure what the problem is.... I assume you are  
>>> aware that each contact entry a turba address book can contain a  
>>> fburl for that specific user. Maybe a use case would make your  
>>> needs more clear.
>>>
>>>
>> Hm alright, let me be a bit more specific.
>> I have about a dozen or so people working on a project, some in the  
>> office, some at home, some whereever... and more people are inbound  
>> or about to leave, given the temporary nature of their engagement.
>> Sometimes they have to schedule meetings with 2 or 3 people,  
>> sometimes with a couple of others, sometimes all of them together.
>> Their current idea of an online calender is one single account  
>> somewhere, everyone has the account data and meetings are color-  
>> coded depending on who has to attend xD
>>
>> Using kronolith, I hoped to turn that into the following situation:
>> Everyone has access to kronolith (and other services on that  
>> server) and can schedule meetings with everyone else, with the  
>> system giving a general idea of whether everyone has time or not.
>> However, not everyone is a PC guru or can walk a couple of doors  
>> further to ask if they have time on any given date or what their  
>> free/ busy URL is. Some arent even exactly sure what an URL is, so  
>> I'd like to keep things as simple as possible:
>> When entering a meeting, they should be presented with a list of  
>> everyone who might be interessted, so all they have to do is point  
>> and click. The adress books provide just that: Create a new group  
>> for a smaller sub- project, add the users and everyone can see who  
>> is working on it without having to jump through hoops or remember  
>> who was working on the same project anyway.
>>
>> Sure, keeping a couple of shared adress- books and adding/deleting  
>> users manually as they come and go (or create new adress books for  
>> sub- projects, copy some contacts,change them manually if anything  
>> changes, etc) is a possibility, but the groups and  
>> create-adress-books-from-groups stuff would achieve the same,  
>> without anyone having to go though a whole checklist of things to  
>> do when adding/removin users.
>> Additionally, the actual admins are not guaranteed to be experts,  
>> but they are bound to change on a regular basis, so I wrote a  
>> script that adds/ removes users to/from all services on that  
>> server: VPN, samba shares, horde etc. In theory, one click should  
>> be enough to add/remove users.
>>
>> Err...to sum up: I need to create an undefined and changing amount  
>> of lists of users with free/ busy information.
>> Those lists should be available when scheduling a meeting or w/e.
>> All users use horde.
>> The current admin should have to do as little as possible and know  
>> as little as possible about the system when changing users.
>> So I need to add an automatically generated free/ busy url,  
>> providing an automatically generated timetable, to those  
>> automatically generated lists.
>> All of that is already there (I hope?), except that I need to know  
>> the place inside the turba code to add a line of code.
>
>
> Ah. You know, I think I totally missed the fact that you are using  
> the turba groups driver and not a contact group inside a address  
> book - this clears up your need perfectly.  I'm pretty sure I have a  
> solution for you, just going to test it, and will get back to the  
> list.

Or actually you *could* use contact groups instead of user groups. You  
don't have the overhead of managing groups in Horde, and users other  
than the administrator can change group members easily through the  
address book interface.
Of course, this only works if your users are in a database (or ldap  
directory).

Jan.

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