Introduction to WebXChange
19 May 2005, 20:21 PM
WebXChange is a a PHP-based web-mail and calendaring client, intended to facilitate time management and effective communication among users of an organisation. It allows users to log in, send, receive and organise their e-mail, and to subscribe to online calendars, share calendars amongst themselves, arrange appointments and meetings in a fashion that can be automatically entered into personal calendars stored on the remote server.
WebXChange makes use of simple and well-supported open protocols such as IMAP, SMTP and iCalendar whilst being accessible from an entirely browser based environment, thus ensuring cross platform interoperability. The software is based on two major open-source systems: SquirrelMail, used as the e-mailing client, and PHPiCalendar, used to provide the basic calendar viewing functionality.
WebXChange Features
21 May 2005, 10:16 AM
E-mailing Features
- Receive e-mails
- Send e-mails
- Save e-mails as draft
- Delete e-mails
- Add/Edit/Remove contacts from your address book
- Folder manipulation
- Edit preferences
- and more...
Calendaring Features
- Day/Week/Month/Year/Printer-friendly views
- View/Add/Delete calendars
- View/Add/Edit/Delete appointments
- Automated meeting request/update/cancellation
- View the participation status of the attendee of a meeting
- Automated reply to meeting invitations
- Publish/Un-publish calendars to WebDAV servers
- Subscribe/Unsubscribe to online calendars
- Export/Import calendars
- Share/Un-share calendars among users
- Change access permissions to shared calendars
- Subscribe/Unsubscribe to other users' shared calendars
- Edit calendar preferences
- and more...
Other Features
For additional features, look at the various plug-ins available for SquirrelMail.
Documentation
21 May 2005, 17:48 PM
To get started with WebXChange make use of the following manuals:
System Manual: a short guide on the installation process
Calendar User Manual: a guide on using the Calendar plug-in
SquirrelMail User Manual: a guide on using the e-mailing features
For additional support check out the documentation for the project. If you have any questions or run into any problems have a look at the forum and the support pages.
Future Work
23 May 2005, 12:36 PM
Calendar plug-in
- Public Free-Busy time calendars
- These calendars will contain details regarding the owner's availability without disclosing private information about the nature of the appointments. They will also be used to implement a Free-Busy time search on the attendees to aid the organiser choose a suitable time when requesting or updating a meeting.
- One-Click participation status modification
- This will allow the attendees to change their participation status directly from the calendar entry, avoiding the need to find the e-mail containing the latest meeting request/update send from the organiser.
- Calendar Search
- This feature will allow users to search their calendars for particular keywords in the descriptions of appointments and meetings.
Other Features
- Address book sharing
- This will allow users to have common address books.It will be very similar to the calendar sharing feature provided Unlike calendars, but with stricter control over the shared information. The user who adds a new contact will be responsible for their details. If another user tries to modify the information, the owner will be notified and the contact details will only be updated if the owner accepts the changes.
- Document/Project sharing with CVS capabilities
- This feature will allow team members to save their attachments and documents, in a place accessible to all. The shared project repository is intended to help the user avoid confusions caused from sending and receiving multiple versions of the same files, and to keep track of changes made from different team members
Calendar Release
Note: In this context the meeting scheduling ability will be disabled
Related Links
23 May 2005, 22:03 PM
Software
- SquirrelMail: used as the web-mail client for WebXChange
- PHPiCalendar: used for the calendar viewing functionality
- Apple iCal: inspiration for the calendar publishing and subscribing functionalities
Standards and Protocols Supported
- SquirrelMail
- Calendar plug-in
Others
- Apple iCal Library: public calendars for holidays, sports, music, etc.
- Project24: public calendars for holidays and weather
First Release
24 May 2005, 12:34 PM
An alpha release of WebXChange is now available from the project releases page. I hope it proves useful.
If you have any queries, suggestions or bug reports please use the different tracker pages and the forum provided by SourceForge to get help or to contact the developers.