Welcome to Parola. Parola is an email application, chat app, video conference tool, calendar,
and contacts all wrote into one. Last year he had foster already gave a presentation about
Parola and talking about the motivation of why we're doing this. I'm not going to repeat
that, so I encourage you to watch that video as well. But this time I'm going to talk about
what's new this year. YouTube microphone problem at the conference is first seven minutes of the
audio of a really recorded. It's about me, shortly. I've been working for 25 years as a core
contributor for two Thunderbird. I've been also in the project leadership and I've been
a consultant for many companies from small start-ups all the way to government and everything in
between. And I created an software for them and the experience that I made there,
educated the decisions in Parola. Right now in Europe, everybody's talking about digital
sovereignty. And when it comes to open sauce on the server side, we're in a really good position
there. We have really good offers for mail service, for example, Duffcott, Stahl Ward,
Mox. There's many, many offers and they even better than this commercial solutions. We have
multiple good options for file servers, chat servers, calendar servers. But with this missing is
the integration between them. They all silos, even the applications are all separate.
And this is the problem we're trying to solve with Parola. Parola integrates all these different
services into one coherent user interface, which is open. It allows to connect with everybody with
different forms of communication. And it seems less. It works in the same user interface patterns.
You can easily switch from one form of communication to another without copying pace, without
searching at the same person and for different applications. And we want to innovate. We want to go
beyond what the commercial applications are offering. We want to be better. I would like to give you
a little demo to show you what I'm talking about. This is the email application. We kept it
lean so that you can concentrate on what's essential on the emails that you want to read and the
people. But if you need the power of the application, it is there for you. Fishing is a huge problem.
So if the sender is not in your address book, we're showing the main domain of the email address
clearly and separately. We intentionally not showing the whole email address because they can be
deliberately constituent in a way that people mistake them for something else. So we show only
the main domain because that's the trust anchor. The same year where the URL, we show the whole
URL. But above, we show the main domain because you know what ebay.com is. That is a trust anchor.
And this is what we show. This email pretends to be from MacAfee, but from the domain here,
you can clearly see this is fishing and you can easily get rid of it. So this also helps to protect
companies and organizations from spearfishing. This is another email view. This one shows the list of
emails as columns. This is my favorite one. But we have a number of other views as well because we
want to show the emails in the way that you like it. So this is an email from Will Hardy.
And Will is in my address book. And as I'm reading an email from Will,
location with automatically put the focus on Will. And as I'm moving through the various
applications, Will will be the focus. For example, if I click now on people, I will see the
contact information for Will Hardy on the left. And on the right, I see the contact history
with Will Hardy. And I see the previous emails that I have exchanged with him. And I can
click on one and can read the entire email. So I can see all the interactions that I had
or I can click on John Cab. And again, I see the contact history with John Cab. But I see
not only the emails, I also see the meetings that I had together with him. I also see the files that
exchange with him. For example, via email attachments or chat messages or fileshare.
And the phone call log will also appear here. For example, I can click on the meeting and see it in my
calendar. I can also make a search application white. For example, on the top right, I can type
Android and click on mail. And then it will see the emails that contain Android. And if you want to
find you in the mail search, there's a few mail specific criteria. Or I can click on calendar.
And I see the events that contain Android. In this particular case, it's not in the title,
but it found it in the description. And the same search will apply in every application in the way
that makes sense for that application. Speaking of calendar, say we received an invitation for
an meeting. So we see here the meeting is supposed to happen at 4 o'clock for 30 minutes. In
on the right, I see my own calendar at the time of the meeting invitation. So in Tokwaz,
you see the proposed meeting time 16 hours here. And what I see around is my actual calendar.
So it knows me which appointments that you have at this specific moment. And that allows me to make
a decision whether I can attend, whether I'm free or not. So I have exactly the information that I need
available at this particular moment when I need it. This is one example how bringing multiple
applications together can support you in a way that single applications can't. And on the top right
is a little calendar icon which leads me into my calendar on that day of a proposed meeting time.
So here I see my calendar on the left I see one particular day in detail. And on the right I have
the overview of the month. And there's multiple views so I can select which one I prefer.
There are views for the entire week or for a single day or for four weeks or for the whole month
and full screen as you prefer. And on the right I still see the meeting invitation that we just saw.
And if I want to create a new meeting, I can click on the plus at the top left or I can double click
on a specific time to create a new meeting. So here I add the time and a title. And if it's just
for myself I can say here and I'm done. But I want to make a meeting with somebody else so I'm going
to add a location. And I want to make an online meeting. So I click on online meeting here.
And then because it doesn't make much sense to have an online meeting all by myself,
and I can add attendance here. So I'm going to type John Cap. It's all to completing.
And I'm adding the participants. I could also make this a recurring meeting. For example every week
or every Thursday and Friday or yearly. But in this case this is just a single meeting.
So glad you're on mute. Sorry. Right. Good. So here in the online meeting is the online meeting
provider that is associated with this calendar account. So the calendar is associated with an email address.
The email address is associated with a meeting provider. So in this case it's a cell hosted
where we can offer a video conference system that you can see locally on your premises.
Or it could be open talk. It could be teams. And whatever is associated,
automated pre-selects that. So this is pre-selected. I don't have to do anything.
But I'm going to add a description here. So because we're talking about the roadmap,
I'm making a proposal for the roadmap. And it's HTML. So it's nicely in need informative.
And I click send. So then I'm back in my calendar. I see the summary of the event here on the
right. And it's a link. So I can click on that link. And I'm going to be in the meeting directly
within parula in the meeting conference module of parula. I just have to click on this here.
But what happened? So we're going to go back a little bit and we're going to add it again.
So here in the online meeting you see there's a URL in there. So what has happened when I clicked
send, it went to the online meeting provider. It created conference here. It created an invitation link.
It put the invitation link in the field in the invitation here. And before it sent out the
invitation, it's put the URL in there. So when the invitation goes out there as a real or the
in there, and I didn't have to do anything at all. I just had to click, make it online meeting. That's it.
So I invited two people, John and Pete. That's a Zoom Pete. It's not in my organization. He's
another company. And he's using Thunderbird. So he sees this. This is the invitation.
Thunderbird has supported that foot quite a while. This is the standard. So he can either accept
or decline. If he accepts his ends up in Thunderbird's calendar in his calendar, and Thunderbird
will reply with a confirmation or he can decline. So we switch back to me. This is my view now.
I'm back in the calendar in the event. And I can see Pete has refused to meeting and John Cap
has confirmed. And I can see the checkbox and it has already read the meeting. It has read the
meeting invitations and put the information in my calendar. So what if I want to make a meeting with
20 people, and we need to agree on the meeting time? Have you ever tried to do that by email?
That is not a nice experience. This goes all-trisk across. It's okay. I'll take somebody
to prove something entirely different and nobody knows anymore what's going on. But this is a
very simple case. It can be structured. And in the ITF, there's a working group called Structured
Email, or SML for short, where this data that you can put inside the email, machine-readable
data in a little snippet of Jason. And with this information, the application can understand
what you're trying to do and can help you with this. So we build a use case for this and you can
make many things with this. But one use case is making a meeting time poll. So I'm here in my
composite email composer. I created a new email. And here on the right, I am click this icon and
I say add meeting time poll. So in my composer, I'm now seeing my calendar if I had appointments
here, they would show up here and I can tell select time slots. And these are the time slots
like that proposed for making a meeting. And these proposals are going to appear here on the right.
And I can send this proposals as poll to the recipients. And they're going to see this.
So they see here on the left, the time set up proposed. And for each time, they can vote, yes,
this is good for me, or no, I can do this, or something in between. And here, as they click on each
option on the right, they see their calendar and they see these proposals in the calendar. So there
is a proposal for 16 hours and 18 hours. 16 hours is okay, because I don't have a meeting there.
It's fine. So I click check. There, I'm not free, but then 18 hours is another proposal,
but this is not good for me, because this is after my work time. And I have socker later. So
I don't want to do this. Technically, I could, but I would be really pressed if we had to do this.
I put a sat smiley here. This is not a good option for me. And then all the people can vote.
And there will be a progress bar underneath here, which shows how the other people have voted.
So that I can see, okay, this is the most popular option. The others all like that option.
I should check whether I can make time at this point. And if they choose this, I know why,
because everybody likes this and only I don't like it. So I'll be in peace with it.
I can also click here on the other view calendar, and then I see this in a bigger view in my calendar.
And this way, we can agree on a meeting time without having all this growing back and forth.
But there's another use case. Let's say I want to make a meeting with, I don't know, bron.
He's a very, very busy guy. Sorry for signaling you about it. So I'm going to propose several
options to him that are okay for me, but I don't want to present just a specific time, because he might not
be available. So I want to propose multiple times. So this is the book me use case. Again,
I can select multiple options here from the list. From my calendar, I see where I'm available.
He has 17 hours. I'm not available. So I'm not going to propose that. And I show up here.
And then the recipient would see this view here. He sees these options and he can pick one of them.
So he sees in his calendar again, where he's free, he clicks book. Then he has to confirm it again,
send the request. And then the request goes out to me and I can double check and then the meeting is
booked and we agreed on a time. There's also a poll here. Simple poll. You know, that's maybe
from WhatsApp or signal, whatever you're using. There is just some options where we're going to meet
and Brussels and Dubai. And I can send this to everybody and then they can vote on that.
I didn't manage to finish this in time before fostering to make it nice. There's going to be
progress bars underneath. Do you see how many people voted for watch? I can see who will just
for this so that we can agree on something. So that's SML. Some other thing we work on is the chat
module here. We haven't released this yet because it's not finished. But this is already working so far
as you can see it. This is Matrix. I see my chat channels here. The one-to-one conversations.
I have the conversation here. It happens to be Mauro. That's the real conversation actually
for Mauro. The thumbs up and this is how as far as we got. We hope to finish this week
year. We also want to implement XMPP and if you are the protocols. Meeting module. I read an email
from Mark Hempt and I have this phone number and I click on Meet. I can simply click Call Mark Hempt
and I can ask, okay, do you want to call this? And I can make a phone call directly from
Parrula. It can call normal phones. I would like to demonstrate this to you but I don't have time
during the presentation to actually show this but we can actually call normal phones. So the idea
is to have a simple integration and different forms of communication. I can also start an online meeting.
I click here and this is going to use we have an online meeting. We can offer an online meeting
provider either in the cloud or hosted locally or you can use open talk or something else.
You click start meeting. We can check whether you're pretty or the camera is working and then you
are in the video conference. This is a video conference module. Say hello to Elena. She's our
Yook's designer. She gets the credit for this beautiful application. How it looks like and we have
a video conference like you know it from teams or from other applications that you can switch
different views. A grid. Maybe you can have the views on the side or a full view. You can see
the participants and add participants and so on. This is a video conference. And it works directly
in Parrula. You can share screen and it's completely, you can host this completely on your
on if you want. All this is working on Linux, Mac and Windows. We have working builds on Android
and iOS. We haven't released them yet because they're still things to work on but this is working
across platform between all of these but with the same code base. We have feature parity between
all of these platforms. I don't know any other application which does that not even Microsoft
can do this. They have different applications on each platform with different features. This is
has all the features on your mobile phone as well. And there is a webmail version if you want to
have the same user interface on desktop mobile and on your company and you want to have a webmail
as well. You can have this. This is not open source because if you use this for your cooperation
then you really want to pay us because we need to pay around as well. We are implementing IMF,
JMAP, all the as open protocols, Calduff card, have we implemented this year? We're happy to say
that we implemented JMAP contacts and as far as I know we are the first client ever to implement
JMAP contacts and you standard. The credit for the protocol itself, skills tours, robots,
deponic, who designed the protocol and past mail and they're going to release their JMAP contacts
in a few weeks. The mail team is meanwhile also supports it. We're working on JMAP calendar
to have that as well in hopefully in the next few months and a lot of other protocols as well.
We want to add more use cases for SML, work on chat, files integration to
file sharing with open cloud next cloud. Mobile phone apps hopefully will release this year
encryption and a lot of other cool things. We have already sharing, Pascal talked about how
important it is to be able to access another person's account in my teammates email account or
something that is already supported in the user interface. In both directions I can share with
other people and I can't access theirs. What we need is your help because we're working really,
really, really hard on this but we need your feedback. What is good? What is not good? How this
well this works for you? Please send us bug reports but it's good what is not good and please
spread the word because Microsoft has like 89% market share and if we want to make it then
and that we need to stick together we need to work together so please help spread this word about
this and give us feedback and we're looking forward to what you think about it.
What are you used to make cross-platform possible? What are you using to make cross-platform
possible? This is all written in 1% TypeScript pretty much all new code.
This is the same infrastructure as Thunderbird. By the way this is Kai from Thunderbird.
And same so there's a rendering and a back end as Node.js front and is some Chrome could be
Firefox 2 runs in Firefox as well. So this is an electron and on mobile it's capacitor and on
web it's web. What's the license? The license is EUPL. All the open protocols are
open source the proprietary protocols are not open source so what's not open source is the exchange
protocols the meeting module and the web name but the rest is and then there's MIT libraries and stuff
but are there questions? We have a poll or a selection of meetings. How does some of the
Thunderbird sees that? Good question. What's the fallback if I'm sending a poll to Thunderbird?
What are they going to see? What's the question? Very good question if I've got to mention that.
There's going to be a fallback so you can have alternatives like your hand and HTML and plain
text. This is like one level higher than that. So HTML is fallback. You see this as HTML.
You click on it. You go to a web page and you can make the choice there and if you have the plain
text part you just have a link and you can go there and you can vote still. It's not as seamless but you can
still participate. Yes. The question was, can everything run on premise? Yes. Parola is
100% client site. There is no server-side component whatsoever. It's all running on your computer.
We store the data on your computer only. All the services can be hosted by yourself.
Starboard is a very good option for that because it gives you the calendar in everything.
You can add open cloud next to this and add our video conference solution and then you
have it all running locally. What was it you before, right? Yes, yeah.
With the timeline, that's a lot of data. So it's a full client. He's asking where is the data
stored so we are able to show this contact history. It's a full client in the same way that
Thunderbird or Outlook is. So we fetched down the data, put it in a local database. It's a
SQL-light database and we can make a run for your format. How are you going to make it sustainable
commercially? He's asking how is it commercial, right? We are going to charge money for
these proprietary protocols. So if you use this in a company, you probably want to have a license.
And his question is, where we're based, we're based in Germany and main development is happening
there. Yes, do you consider being a teammate? Sorry? Do you consider being a teammate?
Do you mean a compatible? The question is, can you use Gmail? Yes, you can use Gmail.
Ah, JMA. Sorry, I didn't hear. So are we using JMA? Yes, we are already supporting JMA
for mail, for contacts. We're working on calendar. There's a few bugs that we have to fix, but yeah,
where this is supporting fully supporting JMA. Yes.
I see. How is the email chat and so on configured together? I'm not sure. I completely
understand the question, but there's auto-configuration. So when you set up your email account,
you type your email account. There is an auto-configuration standard that is about to be released.
And the provider can send back in an XML file all the services that this account supports.
You can have the chat account there and all the other accounts. It will automatically
recognize the calendar and all that automatic configures that you just enter your email address
in your password and all you log in with OAuth. And then it configures all that automatically.
Is that the question? Does it answer the question? Sorry, again.
Now, the protocol already exists. Autoconfig is working in Thunderbird since 15 years or something?
The protocol is generic and it's standardized already since a while. Thunderbird supports
only IMF and SIPP in there, but there's other things in there that you can put in there.
And Perula will read this information out and use that. Thunderbird doesn't, but Perula will use this.
I don't support client support, semil support. I do have OIDC, open ID Connect support,
that already should be working.
The end points are also in the autoconfig file. Yes. If you search for my name and autoconfig,
you will find the specification.