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If you can afford it, Jira and WIki from Atlassian (Confluence) are the best out there. If not, i would go with Redmine or Trello. You should also give asana a try. Here's a list that will guide you through what's out there: Freedcamp - Free - https://freedcamp.com/ - Online, doesn't log time directly on the task Velocity - Free and Paid - http://velocity.pm/ (Online) Time Tracking Brigthpod - Free (2 Projects) Paid - http://www.brightpod.com/ - Specify tasks, log work Asana - Free and Paid - https://asana.com/ (Online) - Doesn't log work Moovia - Free (2 members) and Paid - https://site.moovia.com/ (Online) Time tracking, Does not specify tasks Producteev - Free and Paid - https://www.producteev.com/ - Online, Does not specify tasks, doesn't log work Stepsie - Free - http://www.stepsie.com/ - Online, Does not specify tasks, doesn't log work Trello - Free - https://trello.com/ **** SELF HOST Redmine - Free - http://www.redmine.org/ Projects, wiki, issues Chili Project - Fork of Redmine Basecamp - close source - user friendly Open atrium (drupal) - not good issue tracking Collabtive - http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/ Kforge - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/k... ClockingIT - http://wiki.clockingit.com/ Assembla (SaaS Agile) Harvest (SaaS User Friendly) FreshBooks (SaaS) - Not open source - Time tracking invoicing Project Pier - Free - http://www.projectpier.org/ Trac - Free - http://trac.edgewall.org/ 2 plan - Free - http://2-plan.com/ MyCollab - Free - http://community.mycollab.com/... (Self hosted) Manage Yor Team - http://www.manageyourteam.net/ (Self hostes) Kanboard - Free - http://kanboard.net/ (light and self hosted) ProjecQtor - Free - http://www.projeqtor.org/ Task Coach - Free - http://taskcoach.org/ Task Juggler - Free - http://www.taskjuggler.org/ DotProject - Free - http://www.dotproject.net/ Project.net - Free - http://sourceforge.net/project... GanttProject (like MS Project) - Free - http://www.ganttproject.biz/ OpenWorkBench - Free - http://sourceforge.net/project... Codendi - Paid - http://www.codendi.com/ Egroupware 2014 - Paid - http://www.egroupware.org/star... - Atlassian Confluence and Jira - Trial and Paid Britix24 - Trial and Paid - http://www.bitrix24.com/ ProofHub - Trial and Paid - https://www.proofhub.com/ iCoordinator - Paid - http://www.icoordinator.com/en... FengOffice (like MS Project) - Trial and Paid - http://www.fengoffice.com/web/ Bugzilla - Bug tracking Mantis - Bug tracking *** Task Management Task Freak! - http://www.taskfreak.com/

I've been really happy with this approach, personally. I run eGroupware on my server, and it in turn provides device-agnostic GroupDAV and SyncML services (among others) that I use to keep my smartphone (an iPhone 3G, but options exist for pretty much everything else too) synchronized. I don't use Evolution, but I understand that it is supported as a client (I use Thunderbird / Lightning, although there's currently a bug in one or both of them causing problems that I haven't tracked down).

On top of integrating well with my phone, desktop, and laptop, it also provides a decent web interface for it all that I can use when none of them are available. It doesn't provide its own mail server, but it integrates just fine with what I had already set up - and all communication (send/receive mail, synchronize, and web applications) is inside an SSL tunnel. The functionality I have, for personal information, is as good or better than every corporate Exchange system I've interacted with. And it's all open source, except for the pieces that run on my proprietary phone.

If you don't want to go cloud you will either have to set up your own server or directly sync between the desktops and the phones. Since you are already set on Evolution you will have to find a solution that works with Evolution. I have done a lot of research into syncing for myself and for my job. For Evolution there is a mature solution called SyncEvolution that even has corporate sponsors. SyncEvolution speaks SyncML, so you simply have to find either phones or a server that speaks SyncML.

For servers: http://www.synthesis.ch/ or http://www.egroupware.org/

Certain phones can speak syncml. For example the Nokia E-Series (business phones). Also said company Synthesis does offer an Android app to add SyncML capability to Android phones.

We set up eGroupware, http://www.egroupware.org/ for a 100 person school team. Our team was a legal journal and we need time logs, knowledge base (Q/A), wiki for instructions, project management, resource tracking, task management, and document management. It has a long way to go but we installed at 1.43 and the group is still using it a year later.

There are plenty of examples of web services running on Open Source for 'enterprise' use - groupware, CRM, accounting, the works. Some of these packages are very good.

Its hard to be specific/determine what you're trying to do without knowing more specifics as to what you're looking for. Of the groupware projects I'm aware of, I know the following have a fair amount of support/use:

* Plone CMS
* OBM
* eGroupWare
* Drupal
* Typo3

Of these, I know that Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 are all "platforms" for developing, managing, and extending content. I seem to recall either eGroupWare or OpenGroupWare extend/integrate with MS Office products. No, it's not going to be the level of integration that Sharepoint stuff offers, but it's something to mention, at any rate (and isn't going to have the massive licensing costs + perpetual lock-in that a MS solution has*).

Plone, in particular, has a lot of support and corporate/"enterprise" use. From their site:

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS.
It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.
Sources: CVE and Ohloh.

That alone is impressive enough; but also consider some of the notable companies which utilize Plone in/for a variety of purposes:

Akamai (yeah, that Akamai - the guys who load balance Microsoft web servers)

Nokia (QT Software stuff)

MyCity ("real time monitoring system for Cities, Towns, Districts or utilities. It makes use of the GPRS service offered by the various GSM network operators")

Discover Magazine

Novell, Inc. (for enterprise services)

NASAScience (public site for NASA's Science Mission Directorate)

FSF (yeah, those hippies)

universities, university science/it departments, hospitals, public/government sites... the list goes on.

Those are notable company names, and at least in the case of Akamai, Novell and Nokia, everyone in IT should know about them. They're also some fairly diverse (and expansive) implementations using the same central CMS - and they're not shackled to a single software backend, able to run on any OS and server combination they could imagine.

* The cost factor associated with MS solution lock-in is a big consideration, bigger than just a simple argument of something like "OpenOffice vs. MS Office". With a web-based, top-level technology like this, it's much, much more important to keep the technologies used "open" - because it is the top-level interface to all your data. You can not move away from a closed package on the backend without moving the entire system, at once, to something open (more often than not, with MS). You're basically stuck with that stack unless you want to start over; there's no ability to independently consider parts of the stack and replace them, as there often is with open systems.

i love linux as much as everyone else but in reality there isn't a product yet out side of exchange that gives the amount of seemless intgration that exchange gives.

So what's wrong with the following products?
http://www.egroupware.org/
http://www.group-office.com/
http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/
http://www.scalix.com/
http://www.kolab.org/
http://www.opengroupware.org/
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.openconnector.org/
Non-free alternatives:
http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/
http://bynari.net/index.php?id=7
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/
http://www.officecalendar.com/
http://www.samsungcontact.com/
http://www.zarafa.com/
http://www.postpath.com/

I look forward to reading your reply.

For an SMB with no history, there are many more options available for you than for older businesses which need to support legacy stuff.

The Google Apps method mentioned by bplipschitz is $50 per user per year, and will offer much of the functionality at a low cost with a limited SLA and no maintenance. If I were starting a new business right now, I'd probably try to make this one work and create a work-flow around it while backing up data locally on a regular basis. Once Google comes out with an Apps version of the Google Mini, it should be a go-to choice for a lot of businesses. Right now, though, the whole system's pretty new and that worries some folks. Don't believe the "Google Beta" FUDders -- the Premium Edition has an SLA and isn't marked "beta" (but it also doesn't have the newest features in the Free "beta" version).

eGroupware is an extremely mature web-server based collab suite with Echange functions plus project management, a wiki a DMS (more limited than Sharepoint), and a knowledge base. The whole thing can use LDAP for auth, meaning that it can tie into an AD or LDAP-Kerberos setup. It uses IMAP and ICAL protocols for client software if you want that. It's free, but you need to admin your own hardware. There are support contracts available.

There's also Citadel, which has been pushed really hard lately in a lot of Open Source press, but which I've never used. People say it's able to work with Outlook directly, is mature, and is feature-complete. It's free, but there doesn't appear to be official paid support on the site.

If you're willing to go the Google Apps method, you should also look into Zoho. It's also $50 per user per year, but the first ten are free. If I had a bunch of users used to MS Office, I think Zoho would be an easier transition to hosted for them than Google Apps would be. I like GA better for its simplicity, though. Zoho is more integrated and pollished, but it doesn't have the real-time collaboratiion.

That's a nice long explanatory answer... for the first question! ;). Do you have an answer for the 2nd?

I might even add... do you have suggestions?

I have already checked out a few of 'em (not necessarily OSS):

• Zimbra
• Scalix
• eGroupware
• PHP Groupware
• Communigate Pro
• Citadel
• Kolab
• Open Groupware
• Open xChange

...of which many of them have a great potential, but I always end up having some trouble somewhere or find 'em not user-friendly/admin-friendly enough.

You kind of left out a party in your "win-win" analysis. How about customers? I have one very real group of customers in mind--Zimbra customers.
What are the odds Microsoft would have allowed it to flourish? I'm betting that, at a minimum, they would have jacked the price up until it was no longer as cost effective over Exchange.

"It doesn't cover your tasks nor contacts. It's calendar-only. Yes, open protocols suffer from lack of general, abstracted architecture for groupware - they're all patchwork, stitched together. You can use CalDav for calendar, LDAP for address books (theoretically - no useful implementations of this idea exist), IMAP + SMTP for mail, etc. As a result, each type of object has to be handled completely differently on both the server and client sides. Maybe that's the cause of lack of proper OpenSource groupware solutions - there's no single, standard, open, all-purpose groupware protocol to base them on. Anybody care to design one?"

I only responded with the solution that I use for off-line "Calendaring / Scheduling" since that was the original topic of the discussion. I have yet to have the need to sync my 'tasks' for off-line use, but I do like to have my contacts with me on the go.
Fortunately, I have shell access to our eGroupware database. I wrote a script that pulls the desired contact info. from the database and saves it to a Vcard file. No, it's not ideal and it's something that should be included in the app., but ical and vcard formats allow me to do that.
Also, there is http://www.egroupware.org/sync, and XML-RPC

I've been using something called eGroupware2... http://www.egroupware.org/

It's pretty full-featured if you add all the modules.. Calandar, eMail, wiki, knowledge base, project management (with Gandt charting, etc)....

eGroupWare is a solution I use in a 1.000 users organization for Calendar, Email, ToDo, News, Addressbook, Wiki, Knowledgebase ... It works with LDAP backend and runs nise.

BTW, eGroupWare might be close functionality-wise on most fronts (on project management it's even better than MS Exchange which doesn't do it at all).

But it's still weak if you need disconnected operation, caching and real-time notifications from server to client.

eGroupware has all the features of Outlook with project management tools, wiki, time manager, file share access all thrown in.

And its web based so it works across platform.

It connects to POP and/or IMAP email servers and can support 100's of users on a slow server.

I replaced my web email solution with this and now use it for a whole lot more.

A great project. http://www.egroupware.org/

eGroupware has all the features of Outlook with project management tools, wiki, time manager, file share access all thrown in.

And its web based so it works across platform.

It connects to POP and/or IMAP email servers and can support 100's of users on a slow server.

I replaced my web email solution with this and now use it for a whole lot more.

A great project. http://www.egroupware.org/

Sounds like eGroupware to me.

Been using it for years. Very featureful - in fact has more features than you listed for Sharepoint. Also works in any web browser so remote access is built in.

Only thing missing is version control in the FileManager component. Sounds like a good feature request that would be easy to implement with RCS.

• Powerful calendar which also supports scheduling of groups, resources and even contacts
• AddressBook / Contact-manager using SQL or LDAP
• Userfriendly IMAP mail-client
• ToDo, Notes and Phonecalls, CRM customer relationship management
• Element based Projectmanager higly integrated with all other eGW apps
• Resources managment (inventory) and booking tool integrated into eGW calendar
• Managing files stored in the VFS (virtual file system) based on files, sql-db or webdav.
• SiteMgr: Userfriendly intuitve web autoringsystem with fine granulated access control lists.
• Timesheet application well integrated with projectmanager.
• Tracking of bugs or other, integrated with projectmanager.
• Wiki
• Knowlege base NewsAdmin enter and view news ( RalfBecker, Nelius )

A well done project, a "best kept secret" piece of software is e-groupware, http://www.egroupware.org/.

It can handle private/group/shared calendars, fine privileges, has a lot of modules for group workflow, project management, PIM, wiki, a sort of BBS, imap mail, etc.

The only problem: lack of decent documentation ! I spent one week trying to replicate a behaviour described in the FAQ. And pay attention to grant permissions. My tip: install once for configuration, document everything, reinstall from scratch....

Francesco

With these tools, I have never found any need for Ruby, with or without Rails. I tried it and the first thing I noticed was ugliest quirk they stole from FORTRAN-77: the "end" statement. All the editors I use have a syntax enhancement mode that shows which brace pairs with the one where the cursor is. Why, oh why, throw away that very useful feature? What, exactly, did the Ruby creators think they would gain with that? This very small detail shows that the whole language isn't as well thought out as its fans claim, so I guess I got prejudiced against Ruby from the very beginning. When you code for a living, when the lines of code you wrote in your decades of work start to get into the millions, you will know how these apparently small details add up in the end. I need my language to work together with my editor, not fight against it.

Ruby fans remind me of Lisp fans. Very vocal, always ready to present their arguments, concede no points, admit no failures. But one gets the impression that they are mostly academics, people who do not code for a living. If you have to solve a real life problem instead of a textbook example there are more practical languages to work with.

Oh, sure, Ruby is very flexible, very adaptable, but in professional work one needs the efficiency of specialization. I use PHP for web access to databases, Perl for small scripts that handle text files, C++ with Qt for GUI work, Python for prototypes and C for deliverable number crunching applications. For professional work one needs professional tools, swiss army knives are for boy scouts.

1) I work for an aerospace company, and I recently needed some way to get NORAD TLEs from Celestrak. Never mind what TLEs are, I went to CPAN and found what I needed in a few minutes. How does Ruby compare to Perl in available libraries and utilities? If I have to get the TLE specifications and code my own functions in Ruby, sorry, but I'd rather cope with Perl's shortcomings.

2) Occasionally I have to do some web applications to access corporate databases in Oracle, Ingres, and Postgres. The data contains international characters, which may be in UTF or ISO-8859, I need support for both and an easy way to shift between them, often in the same application. For this kind of work I use PHP together with the eGroupWare suite. I have no need for very complicated code here, these are mostly simple web forms and tables, which PHP+eGroupWare handle quite well. Using the built-in etemplates utility I can code applications very quickly.

3) For really complex work I use C, or C++ with Qt if there is need for a GUI. I often create prototypes for my C code, using either Perl, Python, or Matlab to develop some of the algorithms. After I have the algorithm, I reimplement it in C using the many libraries available, such as GSL, Lapack, or FFTW, for instance.

With all that, I have yet to find a reasonable niche where Ruby would fit, with or without Rails. I can see how someone who wants to learn only one language would think Ruby is the best, but I cannot imagine being more productive in Ruby than in the languages I use for each of the jobs I described.

And the attitude one finds in Slashdot "hey stupid, Ruby is 'teh' language, you must be a troll" doesn't help either. For any other language I can find websites that give detailed descriptions of its good and bad points, but I have seen very little on comparing Ruby with other languages. From the little I have seen, it gives the impression of being somewhat remotely related to Lisp, like Python. How about creating a site that shows some examples comparing code written in Ruby with the same program in Python, Perl, C, PHP, Java, etc?

It's a bit of a pain for a PHP newb to set up. Now that I've learned some things, it's actually fairly easy. You need a web server, PHP, and a database. It will work with a number of web and db servers. You have your choice of file storage via DAV or via db.

eGroupware

I've been looking to do something kind of similiar, and have been eyeing up egroupware to do it. Any thoughts?

I use eGroupWare which was forked from phpGroupWare. Both of these have a utility called "eTemplates" which does all the HTML for you. Try it, you'll like it, productivity is awesome, something like several pages of working, tested, debugged, HTML per day.

If you read TFA, it says "Ruby on Rails (aka Rails) is a Ruby framework for database-backed Internet applications". My point was that, for this particular niche, it isn't any better than PHP using either phpGroupWare or eGroupWare which was forked from phpgw.

Developing new applications in these frameworks using the eTemplates system is a really quick and painless procedure. In that context, I mix SQL and PHP, using whatever language is best for a given operation. For the example you mentioned SQL works fine, although one could do it in PHP in a much shorter way than the code you presented, using "sort(array_unique($array))". Check the PHP standard library functions for array manipulations.

Of course, the application mentioned in the article is rather specific, for other type of work I wouldn't use PHP, I prefer Perl for smaller applications without too much number crunching or C/C++ for large ones.

Ruby reminds me of languages like Smalltalk, created in the academic world by professors for the delight of professors. The "everyhting is an object" concept is fine for the classroom, but in the real world I fail to see real advantages in it. OO offers some advantages in a very large project where you must coordinate the work of different programmers, some of which are less experienced than others. For smaller projects OO can be rather a hindrance than a help.

I have browsed the /. comments on this article and am still unconvinced by Ruby. Unfortunately, most of the arguments are like "Hey, Ruby is great, you should try it!", without real substance behind. OK, the one-liner you showed is cool, but the PHP counter example you presented shows that you don't know PHP that well to do an objective comparison between the two languages.

Instead of using EGroupware or PHPGroupware, we should just start using using silent communications like cockroaches...
 
"...So does that mean I'm #1, or ....HEY!"

It may be overkill, but check out egroupware. It's PHP based and installs fairly easily on a web server. I use it to sync with Kontact via xmlrpc.

I does calendars, project management, wiki, issue tracking, email, etc. It's a great app, fully web based and it now uses AJAX. Give it a try.

http://www.egroupware.org/

I think this is begging to be integrated with egroupware... http://www.egroupware.org/

There's Novell-backed OpenExchange

There's Germany-backed Kolab

There's RedHat-backed eGroupWare

There's all-open OpenGroupware

And that's just the tip of it. There are also commercial products.

Seriously - if you think there are not alternatives to Exchange out there, then either you have not done your homework or are seriously misinformed, or both.

Idots2 is a replacement interface for Egroupware that is a whole desktop / multitasking environment in JavaScript. It's pure candy. A little slow on our old server, but beautiful nonetheless. Try the demo.

While I agree with you, the K12OS mailing list that I continually lurk on has quite a few inexperienced Linux fols, and the single sign-on issue has basically been solved by one of them. David Trask has put together a script which automates setting up smb-ldap for a PDC, and it's here: http://web.vcs.u52.k12.me.us/linux/smbldap/

As for a groupware solution, I currently use egroupware ( http://egroupware.org/ ), which is fairly mature, can authenticate to ldap, and can be used both over the web and thorugh Kontact as a client.

Would someone chuck them a CD with a copy of eGroupWare on it please..

eGroupWare might do the trick. Especially since you didn't mention CMS as a need. Otherwise I would throw Drupal out there, too.

eGroupWare has a trouble ticket system that you can adapt to suit your exact need fairly readily.

If you have put the total of your requirements in your post then your requirements are as follows:

• keep employee details
• allow the Web-based booking, signing off and tracking of holiday requests
• act as a repository for personnel-level correspondence and activities between staff and Area Managers

Think about using eGroupware. You already have it installed and know the application. Try to make it meet your requirements.

Can you add custom fields to eGroupware? If so you could store a lot of this information in there

eGroupware has a meeting request system. Could you use this as a leave request system. Employee enters in leave request, invites the approving manager, manager approves or rejects. From http://www.egroupware.org/?category_id=43

* How can I allow my secretary to "manage" my calendar ? Manage means to eGW that the secretary has to be able to add appointments to your calendar and confirm them on your behalf. You have to grant the secretary read, edit and add access to your calendar. Go to your preferences and start Calendar / Grant access. Check read, edit and add for that user. Your secretary can then select your calendar in any view and add appointsments to it.* ...

Have a look at http://www.egroupware.org/acl as this would seem to allow you to meet the third requirement. You should be able to make this work.

If you could make eGroupware meet the HR requirements this would simplify things for you with less applications to run, less training required.

Gavin

If you have put the total of your requirements in your post then your requirements are as follows:

• keep employee details
• allow the Web-based booking, signing off and tracking of holiday requests
• act as a repository for personnel-level correspondence and activities between staff and Area Managers

Think about using eGroupware. You already have it installed and know the application. Try to make it meet your requirements.

Can you add custom fields to eGroupware? If so you could store a lot of this information in there

eGroupware has a meeting request system. Could you use this as a leave request system. Employee enters in leave request, invites the approving manager, manager approves or rejects. From http://www.egroupware.org/?category_id=43

* How can I allow my secretary to "manage" my calendar ? Manage means to eGW that the secretary has to be able to add appointments to your calendar and confirm them on your behalf. You have to grant the secretary read, edit and add access to your calendar. Go to your preferences and start Calendar / Grant access. Check read, edit and add for that user. Your secretary can then select your calendar in any view and add appointsments to it.* ...

Have a look at http://www.egroupware.org/acl as this would seem to allow you to meet the third requirement. You should be able to make this work.

If you could make eGroupware meet the HR requirements this would simplify things for you with less applications to run, less training required.

Gavin

It's One of these (oh, yeah I bought two for £25!), hooked up to two of these in an Acer Altos G310 P4-2.4 with 768MB RAM running Centos-3.

The system is running eGroupWare for around 40 users and is also a store for their mailboxes. Load is not that heavy and such a non-issue that I've not bothered to benchmark anything

There was no hassle installing the drivers from the manufacturer's Web site. The initial RAID 1 sync on the disks took 90 mins.

eGroupware is an excellent product that has become very mature in the past couple of years. It is all web-based and works great in Firefox.

It has email, shared calendaring, shared todo's. User is in control of what users can see/add/edit their appointments etc.

A default install comes with FAR more applications than you will need, but you can prune it down to do just what you want.

Check out eGroupWare

I would love to know what you and your staff think about this product.

disclamer: I am not affiliated with eGroupWare in any way except that I am also in the process of evaluating it.

That URL should be http://www.phprojekt.com/

Another project in the same vein is eGroupware (which is a fork of phpGroupWare).

Try egroupware http://www.egroupware.org/. It is my favorite replacement for Outlook. I especially like the daily comics feature.

FOr small companies that use Outlook only as an email client perhaps. Thunderbird is no substitute for Outlook when you start talking about company wide contacts sharing, resource scheduling, shared calendars, meeting invites, voting buttons and all the other things organisations are used to using on a day to day basis.

You might argue that an email client isn't the place for such features but no-one's going to drop their client that offers them in favour of Thunderbird when no other app is available to offer the missing feature set.

Like it or loath it, until there's a real Outlook replacement linux lacks the groupware companies are used to and desktop adoption will be restricted.

eGroupware has an excellent XML-RPC and SOAP interface, Kolab already has several Outlook connectors available, but the native clients (Kontact for KDE, which has eGroupware and Kolab support as well as Exchange Server 2000 support) are not out yet. It would be great if someone were to integrate client capabilities for those suites into Mozilla (or something similarly cross-platform).

Most organizations I know are tied to Windows because of Outlook, not because of Office (most can't even tell the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office).

At least the outlook (no pun intended, really) is better than it was a year ago.

You might want to peek at OpenGroupware. My colleagues and I have skimmed though what was available and it seems to be the most impressive for at least the customer management side. Though the look of the web interface will not amaze your artist friends, it seems to work well. You can interoperate with Evolution, Mozilla Calendar and some other programs - even Outlook should you want to buy the driver.

I'd strongly suggest not to be impressed by eGroupWare's feature list and cute themes (I know WE've been fooled). Seems like these guys, though talented, are not really working towards stabilizing the tree, so you see frightening changelogs - like code rewrites between 1.0RC2 and 1.0RC3. They forked from phpGroupWare lately but I can't tell if it's a more serious project.

One of my friends is completely sold to the Horde Project so you might want to try it.

All of these will not solve all your issues but no application does and as these three above are open source, you can do the linking as you like.