Late last month, I was fortunate to be invited to Microsoft for the Exchange RPC Plugfest as part of the OpenChange team.

I've been doing some work on OpenChange, including parsing RFC2822 format messages into Exchange RPC properties. One of the test tools I have can parse up some kinds of RFC2822 / MIME messages (plain text, HTML, some mime/alternative and text/calendar) and upload the results to a Microsoft Exchange server as a particular user.

With a little bit of unix-style tool combination, you can plug this into something like Postfix. So if you're in a situation where you want to integrate a tool that wants to send mail via SMTP, but your network is pretty much "Exchange." (and you can't send SMTP directly), then this might be useful.

Julien and I met up in Redmond last week, just before the Exchange Open Specifications event at Microsoft. It was a productive time, where we did some serious planning and a little coding, and learned quite a lot more about the protocols from some of the main developers of Exchange and Outlook. Thanks to Microsoft for hosting it.

I also wanted to highlight some impressive work from the people at Inverse (in particular, Wolfgang Sourdeau) in building a backend for the SoGo groupware suite that uses OpenChange to provide native Outlook connectivity (using Exchange RPC) to the SoGo server. There is a screencast video that shows access to the SoGo server via Outlook and Firefox (web UI). The video goes by quite quickly, but you can see new folder creation, messages moved between folders and creation of a new contact.

The OpenChange team had a short online (IRC) meeting on Friday. The meeting record is at http://tracker.openchange.org/projects/openchange/wiki/Meeting_of_2010-07-30

We're considering holding an "open session" meeting (again on IRC), possibly in a couple of weeks. If you'd be interested in attending, please leave a comment on the best days and times (relative to UTC) so we can accommodate as many people as possible.

OpenChange is an important project, but it does require quite a lot of work to get it all to build. We're working on the process, but in the mean time, we've (ok, Julien Kerihuel with nothing from me except encouragement) has built a Virtual Box image that provides OpenChange all built, configured, set up and ready to try.

See http://tracker.openchange.org/projects/openchange/wiki/OpenChange_Appliance for the download (ftp or rsync) location and setup procedures.

I haven't been doing a lot of KDE stuff recently (happy user, although I'd be happier if I could find some extra time for development...). Instead, I've been doing some "real" work, and also going some OpenChange work. [For those that tuned in late, OpenChange is an implementation of the Exchange RPC protocols on both the client (i.e. "Outlook") and server (i.e. "Microsoft Exchange") sides of the network protocol]

I recently realised that much of the code I find interesting is about interoperability. That is, I'm interested in making sure we can get at data in a range of formats. Work on libtiff, poppler, okular generators and openchange are all examples of that. I also like Qt as a very nice cross-platform API. The convergence of those interests is having Qt-style libraries and tools that can get access to data, especially data in widely used proprietary formats (e.g. those produced by Microsoft products).

I've set up a gitorious repository (http://gitorious.org/microsoft-qt-interop/microsoft-qt-interop) for some of that stuff.

Looks like Microsoft has released the PST format specification.

I don't normally like to link to MSDN, but I'll do it this once:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx

As usual with these documents, I recommend reading the PDF version rather than the HTML. Also, Firefox seems to handle MSDN a bit better than my (KDE 4.3.5) Konqueror.

If you were a mad-keen PIM hacker, and looking for a GSoC project, might be worth a look.

[Thanks to Tom Devey for the heads-up on this]

I'm not at Camp KDE, but instead at LCA 2010 (in Wellington, NZ).

Andrew Tridgell, Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij and I will be running "birds of a feather" (BoF) sessions during the last part of the conference (Friday 22 January 2010 starting at 1430 in the "Civic 3" room, which is over in the Town Hall building).

The Okular team has never been all that big. Recently we lost Pino as the maintainer. His reasons are his reasons, but I can't say I blame him. I can personally no longer tolerate the level of abuse that we're seeing on bug reports. The latest example is Wishlist item 157284

I'm unsubscribed from the okular-devel mailing list. I'm not going to be in #okular. I'll still look at XPS bugs if I notice them.