On Friday 14 January 2007, members of the KDE PIM developer group came together for the fifth year in a row in Osnabrück, Germany to review
the state of the project. Important topics including Akonadi, KDE PIM
maintenance and enterprise usage. A record number of attendees were welcomed
into the Intevation office and made at home by Bernhard Reiter, Jan-Oliver Wagner and the rest of the team.

Last weekend, a second bout of KDE bug triage took place in the #kde-bugs IRC channel on Freenode. This round was dedicated to the KDE PIM module, with key applications Kontact, KMail and KOrganizer.
All these applications have seen a drop in bug count, thanks to many people who joined the bug squad. During the weekend more than 180 bugs were confirmed, closed, some even fixed right away. That's a huge amount of bugs less to worry about for the KDE PIM developers.
But there's still plenty to be done! Read on to learn how.

This Saturday, 28 October 2006, a bug triage day will be held. This time we are going to clean up the bugs from Bugzilla for the KDE PIM module, after a successful session for Konqueror several weeks ago. We will meet on the IRC channel #kde-bugs on Freenode to coordinate the whole effort.

Some people still think KDE can not do groupware as well as proprietry systems. I found on the KDE site, the German publisher Bomots offers a German book about Kontact, KDE's Personal Information Manager. I decided it was time to see if this book, "Kontact Kompact" by Andre Schreiber, is useful for people looking for a replacement groupware client, and people willing to learn Kontact. Read the book review at LXer.

For the fourth consecutive year a group of KDE PIM developers followed the gracious invitation of Intevation GmbH to meet at their headquarters in Osnabrück, Germany on the first weekend in January. As in the past years, the face-time proved very productive especially since everyone felt that with KDE 4 the time for more fundamental changes has come. By the end of the meeting the group had agreed on a vision and initial architecture for a unified, extensible storage service for PIM data and metadata, allowing all applications on the desktop fast and reliable access as well as powerful search capabilities. This service, codenamed "Akonadi", together with intiatives like Plasma and Solid will form the basis of an
exciting KDE 4 experience.

The OpenSync and KDE teams have joined forces to create a unified
library to synchronize data from mobile devices with the data on the desktop.
OpenSync, the successor to the MultiSync project, provides a modular
desktop-independent synchronization platform. It can be extended by plugins to support additional devices and data types. Plugins for the most commonly used devices and applications such as Kontact, Palm, Windows CE, mobile phones and more are already available or under development. KDE has now adopted OpenSync as the base for its future synchronization tools.

Even though the TaskJuggler Team considers the just released 2.1.1 version of their Project Management software mostly a bug fix release, this release is a major milestone with respect to KDE integration. But before I dive into the details, let me give you some background on the TaskJuggler project.

After two years of hard work, the Kolab Groupware Project has released Kolab 2. It allows for sharing of personal folders, calendars and contacts and comes with improved spam and anti-virus capabilities. With Kolab 2 installation is now an easy two-step process, and the admin web interface has many improvements. KDE recently started supplying Kolab for its contributors. KDE Kontact is the project's official groupware client on GNU/Linux and Unix derivates.

MozillaQuest Magazine has an overview of KMail. Their final evaluation of KMail awards it their "MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice Award". The article includes the top five features from KMail author Ingo Klöcker, an explanation of some of KMail's standout features and some nice screen shots.

For the third time, the town of Osnabrück was the place for a lot of KDE PIM hackers to hold their annual meeting, kindly hosted by Intevation. While the
participants were primarily focused on fixing bugs and getting the various
PIM applications in shape for the KDE 3.4 release, some discussions also
targeted post-3.4 development.