Con:nect Documentation

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Con:nect is the integration of groupware into OSBL. Groupware means all programs that enable or facilitate teamwork as a whole. Basically groupware deals with the three domains e-mails, tasks and appointments. On the other side there is the OSBL with its domains subjects, tasks, master data and dynamic data. Common to both sides are the tasks. The temporal nature of processes can be reflected in terms of appointments.

Tasks generated from processes are replicated into the groupware task domain, thus they appear in the groupware client. The body of the task contains a link, that points directly into the task's ui. A user can work at his option primarily in his groupware client and call the web ui only for executing tasks from processes. Or he can work solely in the OSBL web client, where all domains from groupware and OSBL are conjointly accessible.

[bearbeiten] MAPI

The communication between the client and the groupware server is based on MAPI. That is a programming interface originally developed by Microsoft for the communication between MS Outlook and MS Exchange. The provided functions can be seen as a superset of all typical groupware features. Alternative communication protocols like SMTP, IMAP or CalDAV only offer subsets of these features. Thus a lot of different protocols are needed to provide the same functionality. In order to support Outlook clients, many groupware servers already implement MAPI. Thus MAPI has, albeit its proprietary origin, wide acceptance among groupware products. Its feature completeness and its wide acceptance make MAPI the ideal candidate for the defacto standard groupware interface.

[bearbeiten] OpenMAPI

OpenMapi is conceived to be a set of clean open source implementation of the MAPI interface for different programming languages. It is 100% feature- compatible with MAPI, though it leverages the capabilities of the respective languages. Implementations might communicate with MAPI-compatible servers as well as non-MAPI- Servers. The JUMAPI from VipCom AG is the implementation for teamXchange, a drop-in- replacement for MS Exchange.