KDE for Enterprise Needs a Strong PIM Infrastructure - ervin
Blogs
KDE for Enterprise Needs a Strong PIM Infrastructure
Jul 21, 2026 |<br>5 minutes read
Tags:
kde,
pim,
business,
enioka
This post has been long overdue, but let’s say I’ve been busy and the reason will be obvious in this short piece. ☺
As you might have heard a couple of months ago, the Sovereign Tech Fund did a large investment in KDE software development. From the announcement the details can be a bit sparse on what it actually entails. Especially regarding the part which says “the frameworks underlying its communication services”. It turns out this is what enioka Haute Couture is contracted by KDE e.V. to work on. Let me bring a bit more details about it.
What? Why?
The overarching theme of the investment is to make the KDE ecosystem more desirable for enterprise and public institution uses. The desktop shell (Plasma) and having a strong base to distribute it (KDE Linux) obviously comes to mind, but it’s also about the Personal Information Management (PIM) space. Nowadays a good chunk of the institutional life (public or otherwise) is to deal with email, contacts and calendars. So we set sail to strengthen Kontact, KMail, Korganizer and friends. More specifically, we want to strengthen its underlying infrastructure: Akonadi and its resources.
So what exactly are we working on currently? Well, I propose you attend the Akademy 2026 talk of my colleagues which will cover what we do on KDE PIM!
The Work
OK, OK, you’re still here? So read on for a few more details even though I obviously don’t want to steal their thunder.
There are three axis we’re focusing on:
Quality
Protocol support and modernisation
Ease of use and deployment
Quality
Those who know me also know what it means: more tests!!!
To be fair on the Akonadi server and resources side, we’re not too bad in terms of unit tests. The underlying protocol libraries as well have some unit test. The DAV side is maybe a bit weak and we hope to fix that, but on the IMAP side things aren’t too shabby.
That being said, we didn’t really have a test suite which would cover all the components integrated together. Those are more expensive and less fun to develop, so we’d be working on that by adopting a proof of concept done by Dan Vratil a while ago. It changed quite a lot but is becoming stronger with a comprehensive test suite covering IMAP and DAV.
Unsurprisingly it uncovered quite a few bugs we didn’t know about before starting the work, and gave us a nice environment to reproduce long known bugs that we had a hard time to chase down previously.
Of course, we’re working through the list of failing tests to fix everything we can. Some of my long hated bugs are already gone! Well, I use the master branch… so I live in the future from you dear readers, and the future is definitely better here.
Protocol Support and Modernisation
Our PIM suite supports many protocols… but in the case of enterprise use in a sovereign context (so having some control on the server side, and using open protocols), IMAP4, CalDAV, and iTIP (for invitations) are kings. So we’re focusing on modernising our support for them.
In particular we’re aiming at better support of IMAP4rev2 enabled servers, but also QRESYNC. This should bring a better use of network resources and faster resync.
On the DAV side, we’re looking at supporting push notifications. This is currently not completely standardised but we’ll be ready as soon as it is. Everything will be in place to track the specification as it matures. Thanks to this work, we’ll also improve the syncing code of the DAV resource, again using less network bandwidth.
Obviously iTIP support benefits from both. It also highlights issues on the DAV support which we’re fixing as we find them.
Ease of Use and Deployment
The architecture of Akonadi means that a user setup of the solution has quite a few components to configure. This is not necessarily a problem in itself, but we could make things easier and at times it’s mostly about configuring each protocol manually and separately.
Of course, there’s a specification proposed to support autoconfiguration based on just an email and a password. We got some partial support for it in KMail, but we’ll work on completing this and bringing it closer to System Settings. Couple that to some device management facilities in say… KDE Linux and that starts to look like a strong proposal for enterprise.
Finally, we’ll look into the Flatpak version of our PIM suite and see how to make it easier to integrate in the desktop. The possibilities are fairly limited for now and we’d like to make it first class going forward.
What to Expect
Obviously for the time being we can expect more activity in KDE PIM which is good. We have quite a few patches in the PIM repositories at...