Hi,
Just to add my voice to the call for easier configuration where we don’t
force users to configure countless different things. Trying to setup a new
device for use with open protocols is a complete nightmare - you end up
needing to configure 2 things for mail (IMAP and SMTP) plus something for
Contacts (CardDAV - perhaps LDAP as well) plus something for Calendar
(CalDAV). Many users, myself included are also at the mercy of frequent
forced password changes, which necessitate modifying the configuration of
each of these on each device. Bizarrely, I suspect across 99% odd of use
cases, this separation is completely artificial as the same password is
used on the server for all services (and cannot be different because most
servers regard them as all relating to the same account). This
configuration complexity must waste countless hours across the world and is
a major reason why businesses welcome ActiveSync - just to solve this one
huge problem with the open protocol landscape. There may be some good
esoteric academic reasons why keeping IMAP and message submission protocols
separate but I think the real world has clearly showed that the added
complexity is too expensive.
I believe JMAP is intending to extend from just Mail to encompass Calendar
and Contacts too and I truly hope it will (in a way that doesn’t require
servers to offer everything)
Folks at Calconnect and the IETF have been working on
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-aggregated-service-discovery-03 which
attempts to ease the configuration burden but that looks like being a long
process and needs buy in from device vendors to be really successful. I
see most of the need behind this work as a sticky plaster trying to cover
up the un-necessary mess we have created :-(
It would be nice to see config dialogs where user’s are asked for minimal
information (user name, perhaps server name) and then the device discovers
what is available there (Mail/Contacts/Calendar/…) and offers the user a
way to select them and perhaps a choice of preferred client(s) to handle
each service. The way Android handles some things, where a single bit of
software is responsible for server access and perhaps local caching and
other clients can provide UIs to access this is kind of neat too.
Regards,
Gren Elliot
Zimbra Software Engineer at Synacor