Maemo from samba point of view

Here they are!

Ok, last time I wrote about possibilities that development of OpenChange project opens for GNU/Linux-based mobile devices. Last week, at SambaXP 2007 Julien Kerihuel demoed first public release of OpenChange, including now-in-beta Evolution connector for MS Exchange. This demonstration brought enormous ovations from the public, so I asked Julien to make a screencast that we can share with those who wasn't in Goettingen on Wednesday.

So, please find this screencast as OGG Theora (30MB) http://ab.fordclub.org/openchangeclient.ogg and XviD AVI (20MB) http://ab.fordclub.org/openchangeclient-xvid.avi

Ideally, this needs to be combined with Tinymail in Maemo and MID and should serve as basis for common "enterprise interoperability platform" for GNU/Linux-based mobile devices.

So, people started to provide thoughts on "PIM Suite" topic as Quim Gil asked. :-) Let me add a couple of notes to that.

First of all, we do already have sort of PIM functionality on Maemo. This is either in form of Dates/GPE or Google Calendar's use. The latter one even has alarms based on SMS and e-mails.

Second, and this is what I really want to talk about today, there are options for Exchange integration. Not ready yet but possible. Let me introduce OpenChange project to you. These brave people are working hard on analyzing network traffic between Exchange and its clients and writing its implementation from scratch much the same way as we do for other DCE/RPC-based protocols (CIFS) at Samba.org.

In particular, current implementation of MAPI interfaces in OpenChange allows you:

• fetch mail from Exchange 2000 server
• send mail to existing users in Windows Address Book
• send mail with attachments
• resolve names of people in Windows Address Book to their e-mail addresses

The project claims that by end of April'07 they will be able to release publicly this functionality at SambaXP conference. I understand that calendaring will take more time but looks like OpenChange's approach coupled with Samba4 infrastructure will allow to get natively working free software implementation of Exchange protocols that could be used on Maemo as well.

Ross Burton has released new versions (0.3) of Contacts and Dates applications. And now they have Russian translations though not in the v0.3 release but I hope Ross will integrate them soon. Meanwhile you can download them here.