Some of us that work on different stations, often have the need to use some data that was updated somewhere else. I felt that need when sending mails, and since my contacts are updated constantly, I had to pass a file with all contacts around several computers.
I tried using LDAP with some degree of success, but the configuration was not easy with some mail servers that I use.
Some weeks ago, I steeped into the groupware facilities of kmail and decided to give it a shot. I used it against an exchange server, which worked properly with contacts, agenda and journal. I decided to try it on an account without groupware functionality and to my surprised, it worked as good as with the exchange server.
So…no need for a groupware server to have this stuff….cool.
Here’s a step by step howto, since it doesn’t work that good.
First of all, I’m using the kontact version from kde4, since the one from kde3 had encoding problems on the contacts. So, now running kontact, configure an IMAP mail account( it must be IMAP since the groupware functionality only supports IMAP ).
After setting everything on the account, go to the kmail configuration, “Misc” settings and click on the “Groupware” tab. Enable the IMAP resource functionality and select the folder where the groupware folders will be located, which is probably inside the inbox of your account( there will be a request to create these folders if they don’t exist ).
Now, surprise….nothing happens. There is a bug that comes from previous versions that the configuration file is not updated correctly. The solution is quite easy, so close contact and open the console and type this to open the configuration file

kate .kde4/share/config/kmailrc

Now search for the “[IMAP Resource]” section and add

TheIMAPResourceAccount=xxxxxxxxx

where xxxxxxxxx is the long number in “TheIMAPResourceFolderParent”. I tryed with different numbers with no problem at all, so I guess this is only an identifier. The only number that doesn’t work is zero, which seems to disable it.
Restart kontact and the folders should be created and disappear again, since we left the “Hide groupware folders” active on the configuration. If you want to check it out you can uncheck it and see the created folders.

Now all we need to do is to create the resources for that. Go to the contacts and if you don’t see a section with the address books, click on the “View->Address Books” menu item. You now have a plus button to add a new resource, which brings a new window with the resource types. Choose the “Addressbook on IMAP Server via KMail”. Name it as you want. Click ok.
If you want korganizer stuff too, like the calendar, to-dos and journal, do the same on the calendar.

Now I needed to have separated address books for personal and company contacts. So what I did was create a folder named “Personal” with the same groupware folders inside. After that right click on each one and go to “Properties”. Set the folder contents for that specific folder and that’s it