Kontact is a fundamentally modular application. This does not only mean it does profit from mature components from applications like KMail or KOrganizer, it has also already proven that it can be adopted quickly to support other groupware solutions.

Kontact started with supporting the Kolab Server two years ago. Since then the palette of supported groupware servers has been drastically expanded to support SUSE Linux OpenExchange, eGroupware and Novell Groupwise. With the 3.4 release of KDE PIM in March, OpenGroupware.org and Microsoft Exchange queued up in this growing list (http://www.kontact.org/groupwareservers.php).

The KDE key technologies (mostly the KResources framework) make server integration a real breeze: Initial OpenGroupware.org support was implemented in only one weekend using the emerging GroupDAV protocol (http://www.groupdav.org/), which other projects are invited to comment on and implement.

Based on Kontact 1.1, this talk will cover all a system administrator needs to know to successfully deploy Kontact as groupware client and discuss strengths and weaknesses of Kontact and groupware interoperability in general. It will explain the KResources system and the different methods employed for client communication by todays groupware servers.

Daniel Molkentin is a KDE core developer and one of the Maintainers of KDE Kontact and has also worked its affiliate applications, e.g. KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressbook. As a contract developer for Klaralvdalens Datakonsult AB, he has worked on the projects that brought enterprise-grade encryption to KMail and groupware support to KDE PIM, the KDE Module holding groupware and personal information management related applications (http://pim.kde.org). Daniel has already given talks and presentations on Kontact and KDE PIM at several conferences and trade shows.