Akonadi EWS resource now part of KDE PIM

From day one when I started working on the Akonadi resource for Microsoft Exchange I have dreamed for it to be part of KDE PIM itself one day. This week that dream has finally come true.

At this year’s Akademy meeting the EWS resource was recognized to be valuable and I was invited by Daniel Vratil to merge it to the KDE PIM codebase. After some integration and cleanups followed by a review and more cleanups the resource has finally become part of KDE. Many thanks to Daniel and Laurent Montel for all the great work they did in order for this to go smooth.

While doing the development I have made effort to adhere to KDE coding guidelines so that the shape of the resource – both from UI as well as actual source code corresponds to the rest of KDE so that if the transition would happen, the porting effort would be minimized. This has paid off reducing the time it took to import the code.

What’s next?

Being part of KDE PIM the EWS resource will be released together with all KDE PIM packages, which means that you’ll see it bundled with the 17.12 release which is due December this year.

Feature-wise the current state did not change much since the last 0.8.1 release – all the TODOs are still in place (full calendar, tasks, GAL). I plan to continue working on those features and on improved testing, even if progress may be a bit slow.

If you see some bugs (which I’m pretty sure there will be), please from now on report them to KDE Bugzilla using the newly created component (Akonadi/EWS Resource).

For anyone interested in helping me with some hacking, the code now lives in the kdepim-runtime repository under resources/ews. I will keep maintaining and evolving it as before. Being a part of KDE PIM it will now be developed and tested alongside all other KDE PIM components, which will make sure it does not suddenly break when some core changes are introduced.