Linking gone?

[Maurits]

I 'accidentally' found out (fortunately before upgrading) that as of 6.10, the linking functionality has been removed from OX, and apparantly 'tagging' should be used instead.

Even if it weren't for the fact that we've been waiting half a year for a bugfix in the linking functionality (or at least the displaying of it), and that that bug is solved in the release that does away with linking alltogether, I'd still be pretty baffled. My client has been linking documents to projects (hundreds of them) and people to companies (which was the recommended way to replace the SLOX method of putting people under companies) and if I understand it right, these will all disappear as soon as I hit the update button.

I do hope I'm still misunderstanding this (I haven't dared to try the update, obviously), so my questions:

1. Is this true and will all linkage simply disappear?

2. Is there ANY documentation on recommended ways to replace the most common uses of link functionality (other than just the remark "use tags instead, it's better")? There might be something in the release notes but the link pointing to them is dead. I'm just hoping I'm missing something here because for me it looks like a huge amount of work to end up with something slightly less convenient to use. The idea that we'll have to create a huge list of tags containing all companies and all projects just seems wrong.

3. Are there tools to automate at least a part of the process of creating a tag for each existing link and tagging all linked objects?

4. In the near future, are there any more vital features scheduled for removal without warning?

Maurits.

[Martin Heiland]

http://software.open-xchange.com/OX6/doc/Release-Notes-OX6-v6.10.pdf

4.3. For End Users
The function of working with links between groupware objects has rarely been
used and has been removed.

We already talked about this at the IRC, i understand that this is very odd for you because it seems that we only removed linking because you've problems with that and removal of the functionality is our "fix" for the issue. This is not the case, the decision to remove the component has been made pretty close after 6.8.1 was out. I also don't like that the feature has been removed but maybe some of you official contacts can tell you more about it and possible resolutions.

Greetings

[Maurits]

Sigh.. ok one last straw of hope: Can somebody PLEEEASE provide a diff for bug 13089 so I can fix it myself locally and can at least have links working before they're ditched? Even a messy workaround will do.

i understand that this is very odd for you because it seems that we only removed linking because you've problems with that and removal of the functionality is our "fix" for the issue.

I didn't think that; I know the problem was fixed and then linking removed in the same release (which, imho, is even odder).

I wonder how the devteam figured out it was 'rarely used', especially since linking was the recommended way to preserve the company->person setup in the SLOX contact list. It's bad enough the migration tool miserably failed in converting the SLOX4 contacts to linked OX5 contacts, but after the secretary of my client's firm has spent weeks setting it all up manually in OX6, we upgraded to SP4 which broke link functionality, had to wait half a year for this bug to be fixed, to find out that together with the bugfix, the linking functionality was removed.

I guess this answers my questions partially, am I to understand that the answers to my questions are the following (please correct me if I'm wrong):

1. Yep, you'll be screwed. And so is everybody else who reads over this one line in the release notes and installs the update while having hundreds of links in the database.

2. No, if you were silly enough to follow Netline's recommendation to use linking on all of your contacts, and even more silly so you used linking on documents and tasks too, you might as well figure out yourself how to get out of this.

3. No. After Novell and Netline have only provided you with failing migration tools, you should be getting used to re-entering everything by hand anyway. It's a part of Open-Xchange reality.

4. We'll tell you in the release notes when the corresponding version is out.

This is just great.

Maurits.

[SaHoff]

Linking gone

Clarification please. Current Beta version allows you to create a todo which to me is the important thing. While you are not linking, are you still planning to keep this feature in the final version please...

[holmboe]

Linking - a crucial feature

I reported a feature request that involved linking, and now it seems to be removed all together. The reasoning behind this decision seem a little vague. Linking is the feature that allows powerful use cases with this groupware. Without linking, this software is no longer useful for me.

I hope that Open-Xchange officials read this and consider the implications. Perhaps you have already done that, and in that case it would be appreciated if you could explain your reasoning. If not, then hopefully you have some alternative solution.

My bug report is at https://bugs.open-xchange.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11276

So long and thanks for all the fish!