The Kolab project is a KDE related groupware project and builds on the result of the Kroupware project which was sponsored by the German Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) (Federal Agency of IT-Security).

Kolab provides both, a KDE based client and the so called "Kolab Server". The Kolab Server is basically just a packaging of Cyrus IMAP, OpenLDAP, Apache and Postfix and therefore a nice complement to OGo for environments which have no eMail server preinstalled. Kolab server adds a web based configuration environment to the mentioned servers which makes it easier to manage your server installation.

A very rough installation was provided by Jonathon Sim in the users@opengroupware.org mailing list. We would like to get feedback on people who actually succeeded in a join Kolab+OGo installation. If someone could step in and provide a detailed manual or installation guide, that would be excellent!

Of course OGo would like to support the Kolab Client as a native OGo client for scheduling, contacts and tasks. Kolab Client does the whole groupware related logic on the client and uses the IMAP4 mail protocol to store address and appointment objects in the iCalendar and vCard formats.

Unfortunately the Kolab client is not yet part of the standard KDE stable releases, actually the integration into KDE seems to be stuck since it isn't covered in the Kroupware project (according to a mail by Bo Thorsen).

So until Kolab client is a standard part of KDE, the current (KDE) strategy is to work on the protocols provided by standard KOrganizer and Kontact (iCalendar over HTTP, maybe Exchange-WebDAV and LDAP).