GroupDAV

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GroupDAV ( Group -ware D istributed A uthoring and V ersioning ) is an open standard for providing calendar entries, task lists and contact information. Several users can use and manage these entries together.

From a technical point of view, GroupDAV is a slimmed-down version of the WebDAV protocol, with the help of which various PIM software can access shared data. The specification is intentionally kept very simple in order to receive the greatest possible support from many programs.

The further development was stopped in 2011.

Benefits of GroupDAV

history

There are many network protocols , some of them proprietary, for communicating with groupware servers, such as B. MAPI ( Microsoft Exchange Server ), SOAP and XML-RPC . The implementation of these protocols is sometimes very complex, which is why not every PIM software can communicate with every groupware server. At least for calendar items have lately iCalendar files established on using the WebDAV accessing protocol.

Since such an iCalendar file can contain many thousands of appointments, processing is very time-consuming, since all entries have to be taken into account every time. Usually you only need a few entries, e.g. B. all appointments for the current week. This can be remedied by a CalDAV server to which you can send targeted inquiries and which then only provides you with the subset of appointments that correspond to the search query.

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

In the meantime the further development of GroupDAV has been stopped.

Technical background

Instead of saving all entries together in a large file, each individual calendar entry, each task for itself or each business card individually in an HTTP resource (simplified: file) is saved for itself. This simplifies the synchronization of individual entries and enables only individual entries to be temporarily stored on the local computer ( caching ). In comparison, an iCalendar file of several megabytes in size must be transferred in full each time, even if only a single entry has changed.

Client software with GroupDAV support

WebDAV server software

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ GroupDAV. (No longer available online.) July 9, 2011, archived from the original ; Retrieved on May 4, 2018 (English, Status:. GroupDAV is not developed any Further It's superseded by CalDAV ( RFC 4791 ) and CardDAV.): "GroupDAV got superseded by CalDAV ( RFC 4791 ) and CardDAV (soon to be at RFC ). In fact the basic idea of ​​using iCalendar and vCard on top of WebDAV turned out to be a great success with a lot of support from even the largest companies, Apple, Google, Oracle, Sun, Yahoo, Zimbra but also from a lot of small companies, say Kerio, Zarafa, or OpenSource projects like ScalableOGo, DAViCal, Bedework or Mozilla Lightning. CalDAV and CardDAV are more complex, but apparently people want that - just check the list of implementors "