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Kroupware Komplete
sorinm writes "The three companies behind the Kroupware Project (Erfrakon, Intevation and Klarälvdalens Datakonsult) announced its successful completion today. This new groupware approach using only Free Software is now available in stable versions under the Kolab brand name. Commercial support on an individual basis is already offered with further support options to come."
It seems that /. folk are constantly talking about the need for a FOSS collaboration thingy, and this seems like it should be it. So, for all you folks who are always writing in telling how "Exchange is so great...blah", it seems like this is the answer.
Stop the insanity! 'Kroupware' sounds like a brand of German kitchen-utensils or something.
Now we have a proper, KDE-enhanced groupware solution for all sizes of organisations. Unfortunately, even if it is better than Exchange, those organisations are still going to stick with Exchange just because it's what they're familiar with. Hopefully we can try and get this stuff supported in the workplace, and if we contribute code and offer support to the companies we work for if they use this, we can get more widespread adoption.
Bash script for FP whores
They aren't trying to make a drop in replacement of Exchange. They are trying to make a functional replacement of Exchange. Also I think the German's needed something for their spiffy linux desktops to do besides look pretty.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
native integration with outlook.
i said this before in another post, but i am going to say it again. businesses aren't ready for desktop linux, which means server side solutions (no matter how brilliant) MUST work with the desktop apps that employees use. no one wants to relearn their e-mail client; and yes i am aware that evolution is almost identical to outlook at the interface level. but the truth of it is, the perception of any new desktop software is "now i have to learn everything all over again". it's the illusion of difficulty, so we as developers (and by we i mean you :) ) should make it our primary goal to lessen the difficulty of the intgration with newer, oss technology where ever we can
scott king
It's interesting to find that most comments thus far has been about the name of the app. Is there really no more to say or are people just looking for cheap Funny-karma?
I'll chip in for the ante then:
This seems to be an intreresting product for hybrid companies (like I've worked with) where the engineering part is using Linux and the manager part is using Windows/Outlook. This way there is a serious player for interconnecting the two of them that (unlike Evolution) doesn't rely on an Exchange server. If now Evolution just could start working with this as well and we'll have real interconnectivity. Good.
I don't quite share your views. Having Exchange mailboxes limited in size, as is the case in a company where I work, forces you to use Personal Folders locally - people are just too lazy to save file attachments where they normally should be saved and sometimes keep all that stuff in their mailbox even if they saved attachments elsewhere. The most frequent excuse is that they 'need history of what was sent and when' but they never really look at that shit again. So, it's exactly like on that screenshot.
An aspect of Kroupware project I find really interesting is the "indirect funding" by the German government. The government said "we need features X, Y, and Z and be compatible with Outlook and Linux". The developers responded to those requests and won the contract to develop the software. I've thought for a long time this would be a really intelligent way for government agencies of any size to get the features they want out of software for a reasonable price.
It'd be cool to see a larger group commercial group offer themselves as contract coders for government projects. They can offer a product with X features to the agency, get the money to fund the development, then distribute that software back into the wild under a Free license for everyone else to benefit.
It seems a major issue with many government agencies and corporations adopting Free Software alternatives to commercial offerings is with support. No matter how good a coder a particular OS contributor is, they are not likely available 24/7 to fix a major problem or to add a particular feature. If there is a warm body at the end of a telephone who is paid to fix bugs or add features I think more institutions would adopt Free software solutions.
In particular to Krappynameware's case, the German government is pretty gung ho about Free software to begin with. Their requirements actually included Linux support and interoperability. It'd nice to see a government agency apt to use non-proprietary solutions to their software needs. Such solutions only leed to vendor lock-in and wasting of taxpayer dollars or euros.
What groups besides maybe the major Linux distributions like SuSE and RedHat and maybe Ximian provide the sort of support government agencies contract out? I obviously haven't seen many because I can only list three off the top of my head. Are there any vendors that provide those sort of services as a regular business plan?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
that was basically english made to look like german, you schmuck.
Forget the immature comments posted here - that's sadly to be expected.
Its good to see some governments thinking about the medium and long term implications of being tied to commercial closed source software and actively funding alternatives.
I hope there are efforts being made to make binaries available for major platforms ASAP, and are there any plans to have official ISOs for Kolab available - maybe some find of lightweight Kolab distro built around Knoppix?
With iCalendar and LDAP addressbooks, does it mean Evolution will work as a client as well? Have you tested it, and if so, what problems are there? And how about Apple's mail proggie?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I prefer buying an old SBLive for a few bucks and getting multiple sound-sources in hardware instead of hunting arts-plugins and trying to get an acceptable latency with arts
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage