Save to Contacts

[Rorschach1010]

First of all,

I'm very happy that there is a new player of open source linux SIP clients. It's beautiful and just works (after getting the config ready, which can be a hassle). On linux there is only Baresip, Jamy and Linphone. With the exception of Baresip, the others promote their own protocol/account system and generic SIP doesn't have the focus. All of them have their fair share of issues though Linphone works the best.

That being said, a new player in town is what we need. However, it's nice to be able to connect to LDAP but it would be great to be able to save contacts in an own gonnect database and also to be able to use a carddav server like nextcloud. Until that happens, I will either have to use the "favorites" feature (but that displays only the numbers without names) or stay on Linphone till we get this feature.

In any way, all the basic features are already implemented. I think only video phoning isn't working yet without everyone using Gonnect. So yeah, thanks a lot for this amazing App and I look forward to see where it goes.

[cajus]

Thanks for your feedback @Rorschach1010. Yeah, the contact part has been discussed internally, and as we didn't need it here (all required contacts are bridged to LDAP), a decision what to do with it has been postponed.

I'd personally prefer a contacts portal or libfolks/whatever way to handle contacts. Having contact DBs (and editors) for all and every application is no nice solution and is a waste of resources.

Sadly the Linux DEs are somewhat cluttered and there doesn't seem to be a broader interest of having some generic contact/calendar portal API. At least I don't know of any efforts to do it.

What I can think of would be some Evolution Data Server and Akonadi addressbook backends. Then you have at least the same contacts desktop-wide.

Video telephony via SIP is no planned feature in the moment. I understand that there may be the need for it in certain environments, but we'd solve the need for video conferencing in a non SIP way. Do you have a need for it?

[Rorschach1010]

I totally agree that there should be a more centralized way instead of every software implementing their own solution. To test the best client for me, I cycled through all the SIP options within a few days and used them for work related calls. Every time I switched the client, the call history (which isn't really important) and the contacts I saved in the previous client were obviously not migrated.
Gnome and KDE do have their databases but other DEs most probably not. I don't know much about the portals, could this be a solution?

I don't remember which one it was but one client, in addition to LDAP had also a field for a carddav url. I kinda regret now, that I never tested it with my nextcloud contacts and now I don't remember which one it was as I also tested android client. Could this also be a solution as carddav is also an open standard and centralized, as in it can be used for various different apps to access the same database?

Edit: no, video telephony is actually not important for me personally as I use the SIP client for work related calls, phoning people to there mobile phone or landline. I just brought it up because this seems the only feature missing, when I first started Gonnect. So no worries here.

Edit2: I remembered that it was Linphone on android with carddav support. I just tested this and it works great. It's just unnecessary on android (to me personally) because I just can give the app contacts permission though if I have a separate work-related carddav url, this is obviously neat.
As a sidenote: I just played a bit with my fritzOS interface and saw that even the fritzbox can import carddav contacts.

So I would propose that for the time being, having carddav in addition to the already available LDAP would be awesome. Not sure how easy that is to implement.

[cajus]

Give us some time to discuss the address book topics internally. For now, it really might make sense to add carddav support and we're going to evaluate that.

[Rorschach1010]

Sure, thank you very much for considering a carddav option. Since it is an open standard and in the open-source community widely used, I think it will be helpful for contact management on Gonnect.
In any way, thanks a bunch for all your hard work.