GroupDAV

GroupDAV ( groupware Distributed Authoring and Versioning ) is an open standard for the provision of calendar entries, task lists and contact information. In this case, many users can share these entries together and manage.

Technically GroupDAV a stripped down version of the WebDAV protocol, by means of which various PIM software can access shared data to. The specification is intentionally kept very simple in order to obtain greater support by many programs.

Benefits of GroupDAV

  • Slim network protocol
  • Suitable for calendars, task lists and contact lists
  • Advantages of synchronization and consistency maintenance

History

There are many, partly proprietary networking protocols for communicating with groupware servers such as MAPI (Microsoft Exchange Server ), SOAP and XML -RPC. The implementation of these protocols is often very expensive, why can not communicate any PIM software with every groupware server. At least for calendar entries iCalendar files have been established lately, is accessed using the WebDAV protocol.

Since such an iCalendar file can contain many thousands of appointments, the processing is very complex because each time all entries must be observed. In general, however, one needs only very few entries, eg all dates of the current week. This situation can create a CalDAV server to which you can ask specific questions, and then provides only a subset of the dates available that match the search query.

Some developers have the complexity of CalDAV criticized because it is difficult to implement and may lead to implementation errors in different calendar management applications, which in turn lead to incompatibilities. In addition, CalDAV specializes specifically on the management of calendars and does not provide support for managing contact information.

Meanwhile, the development of GroupDAV was adjusted.

Technical Background

(: File Simplified) stored for themselves instead of all entries to store together in a large file, each individual calendar entries, each task in itself or any business card separately in an HTTP resource. This simplifies the synchronization of individual entries, and allows only certain entries on the local host cache ( caching). In comparison, a possibly several megabytes large iCalendar file must be transferred in its entirety every time, even if only a single entry has changed.

Client software with support GroupDAV

  • Kontact (KDE)
  • Apple iCal
  • Evolution with extension
  • OpenSync
  • Thunderbird / Lightning with SOGo Connector Plugin
  • Microsoft Outlook with ZideOne Plugin
  • Microsoft Outlook with OpenConnector

WebDAV server software

  • Citadel
  • SOGo (formerly OpenGroupware.org also known as ScalableOGo )
  • EGroupware
  • Apache mod_dav
  • Darwin Calendar Server
  • Bedework
  • OpenGroupware (also known as Ogo )
Technical standard XML-RPC Cache (computing) Mozilla Thunderbird Lightning (Software) Citadel/UX
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