OpenGroupware Coils Optional Dependencies

Installing OpenGroupware Coils via easy_install or pip will automatically install a variety of required dependencies.  There are however serveral optional dependencies.  The server will run without the availability of these modules but some features will be automatically disabled.  Installing the following modules will extend the capabilities of your OpenGroupware Coils instance.

• informixdb - Allows an Informix RDBMS to be used as an external data source.  This means you can define an Informix database via OIESQLDataSources and utilize it for SQL related workflow actions such as sqlInsertAction, sqlSelectAction, etc... 
• z3c.rml / zope.interface - Installing these modules will enable the conversions of XML to PDF.  Using XSLT transforms you can turn your data into RML, and then using the rmlToPDF workflow action convert the data into sophisticated PDF documents.
• pysmbc - Enables the OIE workflow engine to retrieve and upload files from or to a CIFS / SMB volume. 
• PIL - Enables the OSSF module for retrieving thumbnails of images stored in OpenGroupware projects or attachments. 
• paramiko - Presence of this module activates the SSH related OIE workflow actions such as sshExecuteCmmand. 
• python-ldap - The availability of the LDAP module enables both support for LDAP authentication (such as when using Active Directory, OpenLDAP, etc... as your user database) and support for querying an LDAP DSA from a workflow process using OIE's ldapSearchAction.

Once your OpenGroupware Coils instance is up and running you should evaluate which additional, optional, dependencies would be useful in your environment.

0.1.49rc7 & CardDAV-Sync

With the release of 0.1.49rc7 comes a collection of bugfixes and enhancements - most notably is the early arrival of service discovery support for the CardDAV-Sync Android application.  CardDAV-Sync, as the name implies, adds CardDAV support to an Android device. 

OpenGroupware Coils 0.1.49rc7 has been uploaded to PyPI and SourceForge.

In order to provide easy configuration CardDAV-Sync uses the well_known standard - so you can avoid entering tedious WebDAV paths to collections of contacts (aka address books).  The new well_known support in 01.49rc7 allows CardDAV-Sync to discover the location of the address books and present them clearly to the user.  So configuring a CardDAV-Sync client requires nothing more than the host name, user name, password, and selecting the address book you want on your device.  Of course you can create multiple accounts in order to have multiple address books.

Thanks to service discovery CardDAV-Sync configuration is simple.

This release also changes the WebDAV hierarchy for presenting contact collections to clients - this is necessitated by the new support for user-defined addressbooks.  Now all contact collections are available under "/dav/Contacts" and the previous contents of "/dav/Contacts" (all the server's contacts) are moved to "/dav/Contacts/All Contacts". 

For convenience the "All Contacts" addressbook is hidden from the CardDAV-Sync client (based on user agent detection) - as all contacts can be simply too large a collection for easy use on a small and resource constrained device such as a phone.

The address books "Favorites" and "Users" are fixed and cannot be renamed or deleted by the user - these contain favorite contacts and all the server's users, respectively.  The "Users" address book is read-only.  Creating a contact in the favorite address book will automatically make that contact a favorite.
New address books can be created via WebDAV by simply creating a new collection [folder] in the "/dav/Contacts" collection [folder].

The contents of /dav/Contacts viewed in GNOME's Nautilus file browser.  New address books can be created simply by creating a new folder.

Android 4.x users can use CardDAV-Sync alone, but users on previous versions of Android must all install the ContactEditor application as earlier Android versions did not permit the editing of contacts on third-party servers. 
Even user's of 4.x devices may want to look at DMFS' excellent CardDAV-Sync Pro and ContactEditor-Pro applications as they extend the capabilities of contact management on Android.  If you are using a device linked to a proprietary marketplace these applications should be available there, otherwise they can be acquired from the AndroidPIT.
Technical information regarding support forthe CardDAV-Sync client can be found at that client's wiki page of the OpenGroupware Coil's development wiki.