dovecot - Jun 2010 - Proxy Access (Manager/Secretary) Best Practices?

I've mostly got our dovecot+postfix+SOGo+openldap open source groupware
replacement working the way I want it to; we're replacing GroupWise in our
organization and I'm thrilled to be doing it. I'm supporting about 1,000
active staff users (and another 6,000 student accounts).

I've got e-mail and calendar sharing working, and it does what it says it
will do, but it is (go figure) different in concept from Proxy access under
GroupWise. In GroupWise, I can give my secretary proxy access to my account and
she can read all of my folders, see my calendars, and send e-mail as me. To
someone that receives an e-mail or appointment request from her while she's
proxied to me, there's no distinction at all.

Is there a way to mimic this sort of functionality with the tools I've
chosen? I've figured out that I can add additional 'mail' attributes
to the secretary's record, and those addresses are available as drop-down
choices in the SOGo web interface, but with the secretary's name and not the
manager.

Any advice will be much appreciated. 

And many thanks to the developers involved for writing and making available such
amazingly good software. Eliminating the license fees we've been paying to
Novell is allowing me to save a technician that surely would have been
eliminated in budget cuts this year.

Chris 

Chris Hobbs
Director, Technology
New Haven Unified School District




--
This message was scanned by ESVA and is believed to be clean.

Am 17.06.2010 18:31, schrieb Chris Hobbs:
> I've mostly got our dovecot+postfix+SOGo+openldap open source groupware
replacement working the way I want it to; we're replacing GroupWise in our
organization and I'm thrilled to be doing it. I'm supporting about 1,000
active staff users (and another 6,000 student accounts).
> 
> I've got e-mail and calendar sharing working, and it does what it says
it will do, but it is (go figure) different in concept from Proxy access under
GroupWise. In GroupWise, I can give my secretary proxy access to my account and
she can read all of my folders, see my calendars, and send e-mail as me. To
someone that receives an e-mail or appointment request from her while she's
proxied to me, there's no distinction at all.
> 
> Is there a way to mimic this sort of functionality with the tools I've
chosen? I've figured out that I can add additional 'mail' attributes
to the secretary's record, and those addresses are available as drop-down
choices in the SOGo web interface, but with the secretary's name and not the
manager.
> 
> Any advice will be much appreciated. 
> 
> And many thanks to the developers involved for writing and making available
such amazingly good software. Eliminating the license fees we've been paying
to Novell is allowing me to save a technician that surely would have been
eliminated in budget cuts this year.
> 
> Chris 
> 
> Chris Hobbs
> Director, Technology
> New Haven Unified School District
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> This message was scanned by ESVA and is believed to be clean.
> 
> 
the typical solution to solve this is imap acl,
so chief can adjust mail folders read,write etc permission
which are booked additional by the sec. imap client

calenders, address book sharing is not mail
typically its solved by dav/cal etc services

most satisfiing solution in open source is horde framework
so you have all stuff under one webmail client, where you can control
mail folder, calendar, adressbook sharing
for mail clients like thunderbird and outlook use the funambol plugin
also horde has a syncml for mobile devices

i have no idea what you mean with proxy,
sogo etc is a likly solution to what described above, as far i remember

-- 
Best Regards

MfG Robert Schetterer

Germany/Munich/Bavaria

On 06/17/2010 12:31 PM, Chris Hobbs wrote:
> I've mostly got our dovecot+postfix+SOGo+openldap open source
> groupware replacement working the way I want it to; we're replacing
> GroupWise in our organization and I'm thrilled to be doing it. I'm
> supporting about 1,000 active staff users (and another 6,000 student
> accounts).
>
> I've got e-mail and calendar sharing working, and it does what it
> says it will do, but it is (go figure) different in concept from
> Proxy access under GroupWise. In GroupWise, I can give my secretary
> proxy access to my account and she can read all of my folders, see my
> calendars, and send e-mail as me. To someone that receives an e-mail
> or appointment request from her while she's proxied to me, there's
no
> distinction at all.
>
> Is there a way to mimic this sort of functionality with the tools
> I've chosen? I've figured out that I can add additional
'mail'
> attributes to the secretary's record, and those addresses are
> available as drop-down choices in the SOGo web interface, but with
> the secretary's name and not the manager.
>
> Any advice will be much appreciated.
>
> And many thanks to the developers involved for writing and making
> available such amazingly good software. Eliminating the license fees
> we've been paying to Novell is allowing me to save a technician that
> surely would have been eliminated in budget cuts this year.
Have two passwords, a secretary one and your real one. When you want to 
give your secretary access, change it to the secretary password. To 
revoke, change back.

(I know nothing about SOGo, so this is my brute force suggestion should 
no one provide a more intelligent one.)

On 17/06/2010 17:31, Chris Hobbs wrote:
> I've mostly got our dovecot+postfix+SOGo+openldap open source groupware
replacement working the way I want it to; we're replacing GroupWise in our
organization and I'm thrilled to be doing it. I'm supporting about 1,000
active staff users (and another 6,000 student accounts).
>
> I've got e-mail and calendar sharing working, and it does what it says
it will do, but it is (go figure) different in concept from Proxy access under
GroupWise. In GroupWise, I can give my secretary proxy access to my account and
she can read all of my folders, see my calendars, and send e-mail as me. To
someone that receives an e-mail or appointment request from her while she's
proxied to me, there's no distinction at all.
>
> Is there a way to mimic this sort of functionality with the tools I've
chosen? I've figured out that I can add additional 'mail' attributes
to the secretary's record, and those addresses are available as drop-down
choices in the SOGo web interface, but with the secretary's name and not the
manager.
>    
I think your question is being misunderstood.  To clarify is your point 
that:

- You *can* give her access to your calendar and email
- She can read and respond to your emails
- BUT all the responses and calendar entries are booked as though *she* 
made them, not as though *you* made them?

I think the last point is your question?

If so then I think this will become a client configuration question.  
Generally the "sent" user on any email or calendar entry is a function
of whatever the client program wants it to be, and so for example you 
probably need to look at the configuration of Thunderbird or the 
webinterface or whatever client it is that you use to edit entries?

Further (assuming I'm answering the right question!) this seems more 
like a Thunderbird / Sogo question and you might get a better answer on 
that list than here.  Dovecot is really quite a low level piece of the 
puzzle and only related to *inbound* email and has nothing to do with 
the calendaring or outbound email

However, that said I'm looking at Sogo and it does look like a fantastic 
groupware overlay on top of the best of breed mail components.  Do 
please take the time to post any interesting snippets that you learned 
along the way?

Good luck

Ed W