Features

Description

Meqaris (Meeting Equipment and Room Invitation System) is a system that allows booking resources using e-mail invitations.

The main functionality of Meqaris is to accept mail invitations meant for meeting rooms and other resources. You can use the same type of mail invitations that you send to participants to book resources for meetings. Resources can be anything you wish - meeting rooms, mobile whiteboards, picture projectors, conference sets or anything else you need.

Meqaris allows to:

• register meeting resources,
• send invitations to the resources (requires mail server support),
• receive positive and negative replies.

Features:

• supports RFC 2445/5545 iCalendar attachments in mails, both with the text/calendar and application/ics MIME types,
• sends mail replies back to the sender using a mail server (RFC 2446/5546 and RFC 2447/6047),
• can pipe the response mail to a specified command,
• supports creation, updates and cancellation of single events,
• supports creation, updates and cancellation of recurring events,
• supports both interval-defined and duration-defined events,
• supports CalDAV (RFC 4791)
• supports booking multiple resources in a single invitation
• supports numerical REQUEST-STATUS in responses for automatic processing on client side,
• automatically updates its own database structures to the required version when needed,
• supports time zones,
• mail replies and logs can have various verbosity levels,
• has wide logging capabilities,
• has a command-line interface - no need to run SQL statements,
• portable and system-independent.

Meqaris is NOT:

• an e-mail client program,
• a plug-in, extension or other add-on to an e-mail client program,
• an e-mail server program.

Meqaris is a program that an e-mail server calls and the user interacts with by sending e-mails.

The application contains its database SQL codes. During almost each operation, it checks if the database structures' version is exactly what the application expects.
If the version is lower (including on the first run, when no database structures exist), all the SQL files necessary to upgrade the structures are run. Upon error, the upgrade is stopped, and the user is notified. To be able to upgrade successfully, you need to allow Meqaris to login as a user with full access to the database schema (like the schema owner meqaris created during installation).
If the database structures' version is higher than what the application expects (which usually means that the application was downgraded or a database dump from a newer version was installed), the user is allowed to continue, but with a warning that the application may not fully work.

Apart from the primary configuration and logs, all the data is kept in the database, so there is no need for any extra filesystem storage.

Compatibility

Various versions of Meqaris have successfully been used with the following components in the following versions:

1. PostgreSQL:
   • 11.x (checked: 11.18), but read the "NOTE for older database versions" on [Installing]
   • 12.x (checked: 12.13), but read the "NOTE for older database versions" on [Installing]
   • 13.x (checked: 13.9)
   • 14.x (checked: 14.1)
   • 15.x (checked: 15.1, 15.3)
   • 16.x (checked: 16.0)
   • 17.x (checked: 17.4)
2. Perl:
   • v5.20.3
   • v5.34.0
3. Postfix:
   • 3.6.5
4. Cyrus IMAP (CalDAV module):
   • 3.6.0

Other versions may also work.