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Kolab iRony with CalDAV and CardDAV support

Group iRony

Article from ADMIN 21/2014

By Andrej Radonic , By Markus Feilner

Open standards and open source are requisite in Kolab groupware. The alpha release of version 3.1 hugely extended the number of compatible clients with the CalDAV and CardDAV protocols, making Kolab data available on iOS and Mac OS X and in Thunderbird and Evolution.

As mobile clients become more popular, admins find it increasingly difficult to avoid offering remote access to calendars and address data to their users. Despite being open source and open standards-driven groupware, Kolab [1] has had little to offer in this scenario. Only its own clients (Kontact; the Horde web interface and, later, Roundcube; and some proprietary Outlook plugins) can use the central calendar and address book. Mobile devices needed Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol or (up to Kolab 3) the outdated SyncML to connect with the open source groupware.

As of version 3.1, the Kolab team from Swiss-based Kolab Systems added the CalDAV and CardDAV open protocol standards for the exchange of appointments, tasks, and contacts to the server, allowing admins to turn to many existing groupware-enabled clients, such as the Lightning Thunderbird extension, Evolution, OS X applications like Apple's iCal (Calendar since Mountain Lion), as well as iOS and Android systems.

For this to work, the Kolab team did not reinvent the wheel; rather, they integrated the proven PHP package by SabreDAV [2] (Figure 1), which implements the WebDAV protocol stack as a server. The newly created protocol layer in Kolab goes by the name "iRony" [3] and is an integral part of the groupware package as of version 3.1, which was the most recent available at the time of writing; stable version 3.2 has since been released [4].

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