KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop?

"Also, KDE is well positioned to take advantage of improvements in graphics capabilities on each platform, so it should at least keep pace with improvements in other desktop environments," Rodda said.

Rodda, who is based in the Australian state of Victoria, said the KDE personal information management (PIM) developers are working on a new framework for data storage, which will "bring about a more efficient and functional PIM suite".

The new framework, coined Akonadi, could have particular appeal to businesses as it is designed to be an extensible cross-desktop storage service for PIM data that provides concurrent read, write, and query access across multiple applications.

"The main benefit will be the performance improvements, especially in business environments where there are large volumes of PIM data," Rodda said. "Akonadi will allow us to be even more competitive with Microsoft's Exchange Server, continuing the work done on the Kolab (www.kolab.org) server."

Akonadi will provide unique desktop-wide object identification and retrieval, according to its developers.

The Akonadi architecture is built around a central storage repository which is accessed through a language- and platform-neutral protocol. On top of this protocol is a set of APIs which are used to access the PIM data in the repository.

"There is some hope that other PIM suites might share the Akonadi framework, which would improve interoperability. Regardless, it is built on solid open standards such as IMAP and D-BUS," Rodda said.

Akonadi's access APIs can be used by KDE applications like Kontact and KOffice or by other applications like Novell's Evolution, and data can also be transferred between the central Akonadi storage and external sources. Such sources can be groupware servers like Open-Xchange or GroupWise, iCalendar files, or through standard messaging protocols like POP and IMAP.

According to its developers, Akonadi is designed to be accessible to a broad range of applications and resource implementations, and therefore it is easy to add additional APIs.