I’m a big fan of NC and very happy to hear that millions of users are using it now.
One thing that frustrates me are the calendar invitations.
Maybe I’m just using them wrong?
What I expect is, to create an appointment in Thunderbird, from the Webinterface or in my mobiles calendar and my NC should send out an invitation that others can confirm/reject in their calendar. Basically like Exchange/Outlook is doing it, because that what everyone knows and expects.
NC is sending out an email, but you need to accept/reject by clicking on a link. For my correspondants that a seperate proccess from importing the attachment into their calendar. So they forget or don’t know.
Also when rescheduling no message seems to be going out from NC:
Actually my workaround is to send the invitations from Thunderbird directly. But it means that I can’t invite from my mobile and need to remember sending them when back at my desk.
It’s all very trivial but nevertheless annoying.
I’m seriously wondering how millions of users can work like this?
Or do you have a better strategy at this?
Have a good time, keep up the reat work and celebrate the new year!
Ingo
How do you expect your Nextcloud server to know if your correspondant added the event to their calendar? It is easy if the calendar is on the same Nextcloud instance (which is the case for colleages in the same company).
I think, google works the same way if you invite someone that has no google, they accept by clicking on a link in the invitation mail.
I’ve had the same frustration. there is no ics file that gets sent out from NC last time i checked, it makes the recipient click a thing and go to something they are not familiar with. even when using the built in mail in NC it was just not very cohesive and easy in a way an external user could understand. i’d expect an ics file and NC to see that i received the meeting acceptance from the user and show that they accepted in the calendar item. ive worked around it the same way, just using thunderbird on desktop with the NC calendars added in it, and for mobile i have davx5 syncing calendar and contacts from nextcloud and i switched the default calendars and contacts in my phone to be the ones that davx5 are syncing and using k9mail. im basically using NC as the primary storage location for calendar and contacts and just syncing clients with it. davx5 might be the piece youre missing to make it somewhat easy to live with for mobile.
as far as email, i have thunderbird on my desktop set up as pop/smtp downloading messages but leaving on the server for 14days. then on my phone i have it doing imap so that the emails are still there for my desktop thunderbird. its not quite as smooth as having everything sucked into gmail or running exchange but its worked well for me for about 6 months now.
As to my knowledge all group wares (exchange, horde, …) are sending out invites as email. replies like accept/decline are also sent back as email.
nextcloud is sending the initial invite over the centrally configured account. this can already be unexpected because it is not the user who is sending the invite. but the user name could be put in the email header.
the reply to that central account will be lost.
i imagine that it could work, if nextcloud would check the account regularly and process incoming replies for all users. eventually notifying the user about declines.
Nextcloud might use a different mail server and might not be allowed to write mails directly from a user’s account. You can imagine that the server sends the mail and sets the user’s address as reply-to. So in the end of the day, there are ways to get a more personalized invitation.
Ok, in such a case, you want the answers also to be processed automatically so that the participants status is updated automatically. So it would then make more sense to use a dedicated server account that a cronjob can check on a regular basis. But for invites with google, I didn’t see such a reply, they also just add a link where you can accept the invitation. Are you sure there is such a “protocol”, so it works between different operators?
I imagine that shouldn’t be too complicated to add.
Please check on the bug tracker and add feature requests there. It might be worth checking existing similar topic:
To get a bit a feeling of how things work and why it was set up like it is. If you do feature requests, don’t do too much, e.g. don’t put a huge list of features you’d like to add. Just one thing at a time, e.g. the *.ics file on invites, then more personalized invites in a different etc.