Unified Account Management
From Evolution
Unified Account Management
What is UAM ?
UAM is highly over-loaded. But what it actually means is:
(1) Ability to create adddresbooks / calendars / task without ever trying to launch Mailer
(2) Add a button "Forget it. Start using Evo." to the account-setup wizard that is initially shown when user launches Evolution for the first time.
why we need it ?
If you want to split Evo. into individual applications, you should have some way of achieving (1).
This is already possible for Personal address books, personal calendars.
However, the cash-cows exchange and GroupWise require mailer in order to get the addressbook names and calendar names, which are just converted to ESources.
This "get-addresbooks-names" code is part of the Evolution account-setup plugins. If some users disable these plugins, they will have a mail-account only.
What is the solution ?
- While evolution shell is coming up, get all address-book-names and calendar-names for Groupwise and exchange accounts configured and update the ESources. Thus you get addresbooks-created using other clients displayed in Evolution without having to disable-enable the account.
- This plugin should be fired independent of which component is used to launch Evo. Hence the plugin for this should be a shell-plugin.
- This has to be a shell plugin instead of at component init code so as to avoid code duplication across components.
- Move everything related to mail-accounts in mail-preferences out of libevolution-mail.so and make them a separate libevolution-account-setup.so which gets launched when user Edit->Accounts from Evolution Menu.
However, account-setup * depends a lot on other preferences like composer-preferences for signature-showing. Find them all and eliminate them somehow. ?
Another Different Solution
Untouch the current em-account-editor* and create a new account-setup-wizard (say Gandalf) who will create basic ESourceGroup and EAccount basic-things alone.
Any addressbook-only or calendar-only user who do not want to launch Evolution mailer can still be able to create addresbooks/Calendars for his GroupWise and Exchange accounts via this.
We can make it command-line-able so that it can be used for mass-deployment as well (along the lines of ximian-account-setup, evolution-gconf-tools etc.)
So the WBS is:
1) Shell plugin to be launched on Evo. launch 2) Move account prefs. out of libevolution-mail.so 3) Create libevolution-account-setup.so
-- This page is a temporary discussion page and hence things discussed are not final
