Hi,

I am new to this forum, and I must admit straight away that I have never used Koffice before; I hope to very soon, though.

I have observed that KDE has a rather nice personal information manager called Kontact, which itself is a "container" for stand-alone software, namely Kmail, Kaddressbook, etc. I understand that Kontact is a separate development project, perhaps to focus resources more squarely on it.

I was wondering why there is no discussion on bringing Kontact within the overall Koffice suite. I would think that with the imminent release of Koffice 2.0, there would be more of a push to finally produce a truly comprehensive office productivity suite.

Thanks.

Don't know if someone has thought about it or not, but I rather wonder what is Kontact integration needed for? I could think no sensible reason...

Well..as bad a monopoly Microsoft is, you have to give them credit for many things, Microsoft Office included.

There is a mail-merge feature in Office Outlook that allows you to use an appropriately formatted Word document (a letter with merge-fields, for example) which will fill in the details of the various addressees you select in your contact list.

This is just one example, and I am sure there are others. I would think that that kind of tight integration between Kontact and Koffice can be very handy.

Maybe such a feature is already possible with Kontact outside of Koffice...I don't know.

AFAIK, mail merge was possible in KOffice 1.x and probably will be in 2.x, too. For that, there is no need for "integration" at all, only connect to the addressbook resource (same resource that addressbook application itself uses).

There is no plan whatsoever on integrating KOffice and Kontact at the applications level. I don't think there is much point in that. But there are clearly plan to use akonadi in KOffice, for the addressbook which would be use for mail merge, or when writting a letter, or any other thing. But those are long term plan without a roadmap at the moment.

klyttle wrote:Hi,

I was wondering why there is no discussion on bringing Kontact within the overall Koffice suite. I would think that with the imminent release of Koffice 2.0, there would be more of a push to finally produce a truly comprehensive office productivity suite.

There were active discussions at Akademy last year on the integration. We're well aware of the needs and possibilities but also of priorities.

Regards

My question may seem a bit odd; if it is, I apologize.

This sounds like a case of "to integrate or not to integrate...that is the question."

If there is no need to integrate, then why have a KOffice? Why not just have all of its components as stand-alone items and have them "linked" in some fashion?

BTW, I appreciate the feedback, guys. Thanks.

klyttle wrote:If there is no need to integrate, then why have a KOffice? Why not just have all of its components as stand-alone items and have them "linked" in some fashion?

There is probably a huge misunderstanding there KOffice applications are very integrated together, for instance they all share the text shape, vector drawing, image, etc... A lot of UI elements are common.

But in this thread, we were speaking of integration of Kontact and KOffice, where the integration/cooperation will be done differently, and most likely with less visibility.

Actually, KOffice's application can be used stand-alone, i.e. you can just install KPresenter if the only thing you'll ever want to do are presentations.

It is true that the applications which make up Kontact are integrated differently, however this is mostly a side effect of those applications existing stand-alone for a very long time (KMail has been introduced during KDE1!).

Given the opportunity of a complete rewrite, the architecture of KDE PIM apps would very likely be quite similar in terms of level of integration, i.e. sharing low level processing, painting, etc. intead of just putting totally independent windows into one main window.

Actually, this is happening using a slightly different approach. The first step, refactoring the storage access out of the apps into Akonadi, opens the door for sharing lots of higher level functionality as well, since there is less or even no dependency on application specific internals.

Which indirectly will allow applications such as the ones from KOffice to integrate at the same level as the PIM apps themselves.

Cheers,
_

Ahh, the good question of integrating applications

First of all, yes I (and other KOffice developers) completely see the advantages to integration. Using your PIM addressbook to do mail merge is indeed an excellent example.
And we do intend to get that functional (but not with 2.0)

But the question can not be answered with a yes/no answer. The reason for that is that the question is asked with experience in Microsoft software which actually doens't hold in KDE. Allow me to explain;

In MS-software (or Windows in general) if you want to integrate a feature like an address book with your office application then indeed you need to integrate the two applications. In the Unix world that approach is, however, not followed.
In Unix systems the idea is that the parts that are useful to share (addressbook for example) are removed from *all* applications and made sharable. You might recognize the old unix saying "do one thing and do it well".

In the Unix/KDE world the approach has always been that useful and sharable features are made separately. You might know the "Pillars of KDE" which basically illustrates this concept. Addressbook functionality is moved out of Kontact and Kontact essentially uses an external application to give the user this feature. KWord then *also* uses this external appliation and suddenly the addressbook entry typed in kmail is available in kword without extra work.

This is a common approach and you will see this in many parts of KOffice. Even more extreme than addressbook data, for example text editing is completely similar between KPresenter and KWord and even Krita.

So, bottom line, the question should be asked in a slightly different way as it can not be answered correctly the way its asked now. The question should probably be if essential KDEPim features are going to be available in KOffice.

And the answer to that is an overwhelming; yes. (but not yet)

Hmm..very interesting!

I look forward to seeing what such an animal would look like.

Thanks a bunch, guys.