KDE for Enterprise Needs a Strong PIM Infrastructure

Summary

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 a...