Topics

1

Community Contributions / Timezone support patch

« on: January 01, 2012, 06:44:07 pm »

After quite some work I would like to present a patch which adds true (I hope) time zone support to Feng Office 1.7.5.

The main benefits are proper handling of daylight savings time and correct handling of time zones in iCal imports, exports and feeds.

From the number of relevant forum topics created over the years on this subject, I suspect that this is quite an important issue to have addressed.

A full description is available at /en/content/feng-office on onebigsystem.com (sorry, I have to write it that way as I can't post links here), from where the patch can be downloaded.

Please comment on this patch here in the forums.

Once I have had some confirmation that it behaves properly I hope to continue work and ensure that all the core functionality of iCal exists in Feng Office too, since iCal is the underlying format used for CalDAV and SyncML.

If this version or a future version of this patch is ever included in a future official release (I hope it will be), I might have a go at implementing CalDAV using SabreDAV.

2

Feature requests / Categorisation of links to objects

« on: August 24, 2010, 06:12:04 pm »

One of the things which brought FengOffice to my attention was the "Link Objects" function which allows us to link objects of different types or the same type to one another.

This sort of general linking seems to me to be intrinsic to a PIM-type application and I always wonder why most PIM programs don't have it. Many allow you to link some types of objects to other specific types but not flexibly like FengOffice permits.

However in FengOffice there's still a piece missing. The ability to define the type of the relationship.

It was a fundamental part of an old WordPerfect application called InfoCentral. An InfoCentral fan writes over here about useful it was: http://www.macros.koenecke.us/InfoCentral/whyic.html. It's true that InfoCentral allowed all sorts of objects to be created by the user as part of using the application and FengOffice doesn't but in any case being able to indicate what relationship a linked contact has to a task could be very helpful. It could be even more helpful when linking contacts to contacts, for instance to indicate that contact Y is the sister of contact X - because there could also be contact Z who is X's former boss and without the types you have no easy way of seeing why either of them are connected to X.

Sometimes it will be enough to have a neutral link but other times an explanation would help. The user could be allowed to define any number of relationship types which are appropriate for a given pair of object types. For instance contact<->contact would have different relationship options to contact<->company and contact<->event or company<->task or event<->task. Each relationship should have two definitions, depending on direction, so that when displayed from the far side of the link the appropriate inverse relationship would appear, for instance if Y is the "parent of" X, X would appear as "child of" Y.

I believe this would add a lot of value without so much overhead as it could be completely optional to use.

3

Feature requests / SyncML synchronisation - technical issues and special features

« on: August 24, 2010, 04:52:46 pm »

The thread which originally proposed making it possible to sync FengOffice with Funambol and thereby to mobile devices seems to have adopted the proposal to use Mooha to turn FengOffice into the SyncML server (http://forums.fengoffice.com/index.php?topic=2634.msg15400#msg15400). At least I hope that's the idea.

If it's really feasible I think it's a much better way to go because it would make it much easier to control what data from FengOffice gets to the mobile device, and how the sync would work. While Funambol has had much longer to mature and become stable than Mooha, it doesn't and never will support many of the concepts which are extremely attractive in FengOffice and if all synchronisation has to pass through Funambol a lot of the appeal will be lost.

I have been thinking about how Funambol works (based on my limited experience with my home installation) versus some principles in FengOffice and it seems to me that, on one hand, there are some areas in which care must be taken, and, on the other, that syncing directly to FengOffice might allow some useful features. Some further ideas would be relevant even if syncing FengOffice against a server like Funambol.

Here are some basic thoughts to start a discussion and inspire further ideas:

• Workspaces are a big potential complication. Let's say a user syncs against all items for which he has permissions. Presumably if a client user (I mean client in SyncML terms) gets permissions for records he didn't have permissions for before, the record could be marked as new for him (even though overall it's not new) and it would be added to the client. But what happens if permissions are taken away? The records could be flagged as deleted for the purposes of the client user, and they would be deleted from the client, but remain in the database for other users. If the user has updated the record on the client in the meantime what happens? Another server would presumably have to tackle this as a conflict and one solution is to drop the deleted record and keep the changed one. But where should FengOffice put this record? The user no longer has rights to the previous workspace but on the other hand it might make sense to put the updated record in the original workspace for the benefit of those who deleted the unupdated one.
• It also needs to be clear what to do when a user has read-only access to a workspace. If FengOffice is the server then special provisions can probably be made, but if Feng has to sync with Funambol maybe it gets more complicated?? (I thought so earlier, now I'm not sure it makes a difference)
• Different devices support different fields; FengOffice should be able to handle these nicely with Custom Properties. Anything which doesn't have a standard field to be mapped to could go in a Custom Property.
• Some devices only support one category, i.e. one value out of a defined list. Things in FengOffice have a primary or only workspace (right?) but can have many tags. Perhaps a user might prefer to have one of a selection of possible tags as the record category on his device, rather than a workspace. It would be nice if the user could decide how the record category would be set on the client, eg allow defining a list of tags in order, and the record category would be set as the first applicable tag in the list. Or let the user decide that the category should be the workspace.
• Since many/most devices don't have tagging options etc any data input on a client and synced to FengOffice may be missing information which could be set if working directly in Feng. It would be nice to define a tag which would be automatically set on any record updated or created by a sync (different tags for inserts/updates even?) and then the user could check for records with those tags and complete them.
• Bookmark sync with Web Links! Don't miss this! Most SyncML systems don't support bookmark sync but it sounds very useful
• Sync filters - make sync of records depending on the presence of a given tag in the record. This could make it very simple to minimise the amount of synced data. Or sync specific workspaces only. Either way, a user may not need ALL their contacts in their phone - let them tag the ones they want with "sync to phone" or something like that
• Change log - I find that syncing different clients with Funambol has made data disappear from some of them, perhaps because of different field labelling. If things like Contacts in Feng could have a log where data changes (in GUI or sync) are saved away, at least for structured records like contacts, a user wouldn't need to fuss with a backup to see if a sync has messed up his data.
• Even if Mooha is the chosen implementation, perhaps it would be a good idea to ensure that StS (Server to Server) sync with Funambol works, leaving the option to use FengOffice with an existing Funambol server?

I hope this is productive!