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Domain: groupdav.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to groupdav.org.

Comments · 11

  1. Re:Zimbra Admins by Dan+Farina · · Score: 1 · on How Microsoft-Yahoo Will Affect Open Source

    My recollection is that Zimbra has some very funky goings-ons in their licensing, and I'm not sure if "Freedom to Fork" is preserved in a reasonable way. (A license that forces derivatives to show their trademarked logo?) Therefore, I have never considered deploying Zimbra on the principle that in event of Zimbra's failure that a knowledge-vacuum would cause other firms to pick up the product.

    Plus many of the modules that makes Zimbra actually useful are closed source.

    For now I'd rather deploy Citadel ( http://www.citadel.org/ ) w/GroupDAV ( http://www.groupdav.org/ ). In particular its speed, turnkey-style administration, and replication options (thanks to BerkeleyDB) make it pretty attractive on the whole.

    For more information, see
    http://www.rants.org/2007/06/26/when-is-open-source-not-open-source/

  2. OpenGroupware by Whitemice · · Score: 1 · on Which Shared Calendar Package Would You Use?

    Been using it since 2003; fast, stable, and feature complete.

    http://www.opengroupware.org/

    It supports GroupDAV [ http://www.groupdav.org/ ] which is an up-and-coming collaboration standard; there is already and Evolution plugin and a Thunderbird address book plugin. Mobile devices can be sync'd via the Fumanbol GroupDAV connector. And there is a commerical M$-Outlook connector (ZideLook), which is a real MAPI connector, not some weird sync-thing; ZideLook costs about $35 a seat. The OpenGroupware server is completely free.

    >Ideally, the web side would be written in PHP to minimize time to integrate with the rest of the sites

    OpenGroupware is not a PHP script; it is written in Objective-C [fast!]. But it supports an XML-RPC so integrating with customized applications is very easy. We have a sophisticated CRM application, written in PHP, built around OpenGroupware.

    You can also access the contacts, project files, and project notes, via WebDAV. Mounting your groupware server via fuse/wdfs or NetDrive is pretty cool.

  3. Re:Outlook Competitor (finally) by Whitemice · · Score: 1 · on Why Desktop Email Still Trumps Webmail

    >If only we could convince someone to write the Exchange competitor on an open database...

    Done.

    http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thunde rbird_groupdav_plugin.html
    http://www.groupdav.org/
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/24/172207

    Pick from one of several groupware servers.

  4. Closer to an end-to-end solution. by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1 · on Mozilla Lightning 0.1 Released

    Even though us geeks tend to see little value in having a calendar bolted to an email program, there are lots of people out there who just can't seem to live without it. So this is a good first step.

    But don't go looking for the one big server app that's going to be the "Exchange Killer" that goes with it. That's not how the open source world is answering that challenge. Exchange will not be a Goliath felled by David, it will be more like a Gulliver restrained by multiple Lilliputians. This is because programs like Lightning aren't being written to work with a single server -- they're using Webcal (iCalendar publish/subscribe over HTTP, made popular by Apple of course) and can talk to groupware servers like Citadel and OpenGroupware today. Further on down the line, connectors will become available for the emerging standard GroupDAV protocol. For more complex server-side logic, eventually CalDAV will come out of draft as well.

    It's going to be a great world. Finally, after all these years of delay, group calendaring and scheduling will be as open, interoperable, and non-dominated-by-one-player as email is today.

  5. Re:Giant Heads by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Goes Head-to-Head With IBM
    keeping them too busy to crush the smaller players entering the groupware market
    Microsoft happened to score big with Outlook and Exchange because they bolted a calendar and an email program together at the right time. They know that this is a big lock-in point for them. Unfortunately for Microsoft, end-to-end support for integration of the most popular groupware features (email, address book, calendar, tasks, and notes) are rapidly coming together in open source offerings, so they've been trying to create the next big lock-in opportunity by "collaboration enabling" all of their software. They want to get their customers into a state where they need to have Office bolted to SharePoint in order to do anything useful. The problem is, most users don't care. They don't need to have spreadsheets that are active through three desktops at once. They just want the damn calendar to work. This gives the open source offerings some time to catch up.
  6. Re:Call for convergence by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1 · on Multiple Front-End Solutions for Email and Calendaring?

    I've been looking at the free calendaring disaster for a while now - and it is; there are perhaps 5-10 different packages, none of which interoperate; some very nice clients that only talk to really crap servers and some very nice servers with poor clients.

    Funny, that's exactly the problem that GroupDAV is supposed to solve. On the client side, Kontact and a few others support it; on the server side, Citadel and OpenGroupware.org (plus a few others) support it. It's just a matter of getting the other major players on board.

  7. Already been done. by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 3, Informative · on Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension

    Sounds like Microsoft is trying to re-invent GroupDAV, which is an open standard developed for precisely this purpose. Microsoft just has to be a childish brat and do things its own way.

  8. Support for open source calendar servers? by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 4, Insightful · on Palm and RIM to Collaborate on Treo Software

    Ideally, I would like to see this fancy new combined software package contain support for either SyncML or GroupDAV. It would be nice to connect to open source calendar servers, using a sync server like Sync4J or even natively on standards-compliant calendar servers.

  9. This will take a long time... by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 4, Insightful · on Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar

    ...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based functionality for PIM (Personal Information Management) software. Yes, people really do want a replacement for Outlook, and the open source community would do well to offer complete, end-to-end solutions. Combine the Lightning client with standards-based servers and you've got a good shot at finally getting people to dump Outlook and Exchange.

    Here's the thing, though: everyone seems to assume that we need an "Outlook Killer" and an "Exchange Killer." This is, in fact, not true. "One size fits all" only works for Microsoft because Microsoft forces that model. In an ideal world, everyone will select the products that fit them best, and those products will all work together. That means some folks might choose Lightning, some might choose Aethera instead, and they'd still be able to interact with each other's calendars. On the server side, the dozen or so open source groupware servers such as Kolab, OGo, Citadel, and PHPgroupware would all be able to speak common protocols with Lightning and other clients. Users would choose based on other features; for example, one organization might want strong support for forms-based workflow, another might want rich real-time communications, another might want a large selection of third-party plugins. The idea is to allow people to choose their software based on the feature set, rather than by being locked into one choice because, for example, only Exchange supports all the features of Outlook.

    It's going to take a lot of cooperation but we'll get there.

  10. Abandonware. Try Citadel instead. by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Novell Releasing Hula and 200,000+ Lines of Code

    I'd like to remind everyone that the Citadel project has a complete, robust, flexible open source groupware server that, unlike Hula, is not abandonware. And, it works today, has developers actively working on it, contains a high-performance standalone messaging engine, does IMAP, calendaring (with support for upcoming versions of Kontact and Evolution built-in thanks to GroupDAV), a nice web-based front end, and all the other stuff you expect. Go check it out.

    By the way, CalDAV is starting to become widely regarded as too cumbersome to implement properly. GroupDAV is the upcoming standard -- not only is it simpler to implement (resulting in fewer buggy implementations) but it also supports all the usual groupware object types -- not only calendars, but tasks, contacts (using vCard), etc. GroupDAV support is currently in beta for Kontact, Evolution, Citadel, and OpenGroupware.org. Go check that out too.

  11. Open source groupware standards by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 2, Informative · on Mozilla Sunbird's First Official Release
    The problem we've been failing to solve for way too long is that there's no standard access protocol for open source groupware clients to talk to open source groupware servers. Fortunately, this is about to change.

    GroupDAV is a subset of DAV designed to handle this task. The draft version of the spec is available already, and unlike most new protocols, its primary goal is to be simple enough for widespread implementation. GroupDAV uses the vCalendar/iCalendar and vCard standard data formats, and a simple HTTP-based transport with some DAV-like methods to allow searching and updating.

    GroupDAV is being implemented by (at least) the following projects:
    • Citadel (open source groupware server)
    • OpenGroupware (another server)
    • Kontact (and KOrganizer, et al) (the KDE groupware client)
    • Evolution (client)
    • There is a Sunbird implementation rumored to be in its beginning stages as well.

    It's probably only a matter of time before some third party ties Outlook into GroupDAV as well.

    I've been advocating the idea of open source groupware since 1998. Fortunately, some concensus is finally starting to form about how everything is going to interoperate. Exchange is one of the most heinous Microsoft products out there and it's about time we displaced it.