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Opengroupware
An anonymous reader writes: "From the OpenGroupware.org site: the OGo project announces its formation and the release today to the worldwide open source development community of its groupware server software. Gary Frederick, Leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project says: 'Just to be perfectly clear, this is an MS Exchange take-out. OGo is important because it's the missing link in the open source software stack. It's the end of a decade-long effort to map all the key infrastructure and standard desktop applications to free software.' There are also plenty of screenshots of Outlook, Evolution, Korganizer, iCal etc. accessing the server."
Looking at this it looks as though Outlook requires a plugin in order to access the server. However as that plugin is also Open Source, I don't see a major problem with this. The users can't tell the difference.
There is an open source public branch exchange solution already. Supports SIP phones, conferencing, etc.
Check it out. It's stable, easy to work with, and the mailing list is very active.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
There are two definitions of groupware in the industry. The Microsoft one: groupware consists of email with some additional productivity: Calendar, Mail, and basic forms(which are hardly ever used). And the IBM Lotus one: groupware consists of database forms for routing and document management and email.
Competing with the Outlook definition:
OS foundations Chandler (Calendar focused)
Mozilla Mail (+calendar proj)
Evolution
Open Groupware
kmail/KGroupware
And from the Lotus Perspective:
www.phpgroupware.org
zope
OpenACS
And Lotus Domino which runs on Linux. The client works fine in wine or crossover - but is not officially supported.
maybe this can't cut it in the big enterprise just yet, but there's tons of small businesses that don't need or can live without the advanced features of exchange. Especially when an exchange solution costs (I'm sure I could find it cheaper, but I'm lazy) $1199 for win2k server + ($700 || $4000) for exchange + ($67 * #users) for client licenses. For a company with only 10 employees, that's a minimum of $2570 for email software costs alone (since exchange is typically run on a dedicated machine).
USE='clever' emerge -u sig
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Hylafax could be set up to do that easily, and has been.
We just purchased Oracle's collaboration suite for various reasons. One thing that Oracle needs improvement on is the web interface. Why, because it totally sucks! A high school web development class could do a better job. IMHO, what Oracle needs to do is borrow the code from OpenGroupware's web interface and then give back something. Just like Apple did with Safari/Konqueror.
But in most cases, Microsoft was the first to do these things.
I believe Lotus was a full blown groupware suite before Outlook. For all I know, maybe even Lotus wasn't the first. MS is rarely the first to do anything; they are masters at co-opting other proprietary vendors innovations....then claiming them for their own.
go to the about page. The plugin is available from the original company. I am guessing that they are selling it .
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, it is not open source. I've met them today at the Linux Tag in Karlsruhe. It will start at around 65 per User.
more.groupware is another Open Source project for web-based groupware.
It looks like their WebUI feature takes care of your web access question. From the screenshots it looks like it does calendars, but the rest is my guess.
"You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine." ~Homer S
"Et tu Brutus?"
Wasnt this what the Czar of rome said when his former ally Brutus stabbed him in the back?
The open source movement is hardly an ally of MS Exchange or am I missing out?
Anyway, what I was thinking was that Yes, you are right. Competing with Exchange IS a tough fight mainly because of Outlook being the most popular browser combined with the most widespread and, in my view, one of the most powerful collaboration systems around.
I support, implement and manage (mostly) *nix based systems..... And then we have Exchange. Impossible to get rid of because of two things:
A) Users like outlook
B) No other collaboration tool for the same cost or less impresses management
Now, point A) is easy. Most users tend to love Evolution too since it works in the exact same way but without shared calendars and the like, no change of software. period. Points B kicks in.
Any attempt to solve point B, ANY attempt, is most welcome.
I DO hope this will work since one of the major downsides of Exchange is the crappy protocol MAPI and its successors.
True ravers don't need drugs
A: He's usually called a "Caesar" not a "Czar".
B: He was stabbed in the crotch, not the back.
C: According to Plutarch he said kai su, teknon; according to Shakespeare he said et tu, brute.
It's funny, I've noticed how in love PHB's are with exchange because of all the bullet-points it has.
But when I think about it, I've never seen an office use exchange/outlook for anything but email and signing up for the conference room on a single public calendar.
All's true that is mistrusted
Ts,Ts,Ts. Kids today. Never read something else than comics.
A: He's usually called a "Caesar" not a "Czar".He's not called "a" Caesar. He was the Caesar, Julius Caesar. He was killed at the idens of March 44 BC, because he wanted to become imperator of Rome. The terms "Czar", "Zar" and "Kaiser" are derived from his name. And also the month of July and until 1513 the Calendar was named the "julian calendar" because he invented or at least ordered it.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
But Outlook has to stay. Primarily because no other application is able to do synchronization with PDA:s (both PocketPC and Palm devices) in a decent way. It's a shame that such a basic feature seems so hard to implement in OSS clients.
Mail is easy to replace. Exchange already supports IMAP, and throwing in an OSS IMAP-server (Cyrus for example) is a piece of cake. Tell everyone to configure Outlook to use the new IMAP-server and you're done.
Address book functionality _should_ work with an LDAP-server like OpenLDAP. Read this.
The calendar thing is the hard part. Outlook supports publishing iCalendar data via WebDAV and FTP, but that's just FREEBUSY-info wich Mozilla Calendar ignores, and Mozilla publishes complete iCal-events which Outlook ignores. Great. Sure, there are closed source plug-ins for Outlook that could do the job, but we're after a completely open source solution at the server end.
I think we're going to replace what we can anyway and just skip the calendar part right now. Hopefully some software will evolve that we can drop in for a complete calendar solution some time in the near future.
EMail was based on IMAP, SMTP, and IMSP and came from a company then known as Esys, later ExecMail, not sure if they even exist anymore).
Originally it was called "Simeon" (MUA and MTA pieces), from Canadian firm Esys. Then it was Execmail from Execmail, Inc. Then, there were some mergers involving companies called Isode and Messaging Direct, Inc. (one of which may now own the other; I forget).In any event, that firm now owns the rights, and could resell it if it wished, but has apparently discontinued the product, as they're no longer in that business.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com