[Cosmo-dev] Understanding the Cosmo server side target users

[Vinubalaji Gopal]

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 15:37 -0700, Priscilla Chung wrote:
> Could someone go though and explain in layman's terms what each  
> feature means and who would find it useful?
I will start with a few of them.


>      +  External directory integration (LDAP, Kerberos (Apple has these)
>            + Auth only, profile in Cosmo

It will allow a end-user to use his existing setup, which means a user
can just deploy Cosmo without adding any users in Cosmo. All the user
authentication information will be part of an external LDAP or Kerberos
server and Cosmo will query this external server.


>            + Profile in the directory
Does it include all the events, address book, resource associated with a
user? 


>      + Integration with single sign-on/digital ID
>            + Shibboleth/SAML/Library
>            + OpenID?
A different form of security. Using this the end user may not register
an account with Cosmo (similar to LDAP) and use a different centralized
service for  authentication. Its in a way similar to LDAP
authentication, but the authentication information is kept in a
different domain. For eg: say a user has an account with Yahoo and he
can use the same account information to login to a couple of websites.
Each of the above spec provide a different kind of authentication
mechanism and I am referring to one of them.


>      + ACL based security (Apple has this)
>            + Would also need a UI for managing these
>            + WEBDAV ACL extensions
>            + A UI which is part of Cosmo
>            + WEBDAV principle support - Kervin - use Cosmo as a poor  
> man's address book
>            + Handling groups - implies existence of group calendars
A fine grained security model for Cosmo. Each resource (each event or
each address book or any other resource) will have the read, write
access based on owner, group or other (similar to the unix access model)
or it can have a more complex fine grained control on each resource.
Use-case: some of the resources in a collection can me made public or a
resource can be made accessible to a particular group of people.

>      + CardDAV?
The end-user can use Cosmo as an address book server. He can store all
his address book (vCard's) in Cosmo and do different operations like
querying all the address book (based on a search criteria), etc.


>      + XMPP support
End user can get notifications on a XMPP enabled client. This includes
getting notifications on your google talk and the other XMPP
implementations including all the Jabber users. One of the use case will
be getting alarms in your chat client.

>      + Import existing data
Backup solution.