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."

Comments

Hopefully this fulfills the Exchange Need

[rowanxmas]

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.

Re:Hopefully this fulfills the Exchange Need

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Pardon me French, but here goes:

Outlook is a shithole of bugs, incompatibilities, dangerous security flaws and second rate patches which obfuscate its vulnerabilities instead of repair them.

The quicker Evolution lives up to its name, and departs from an Outlook-style UI model, the better. There are real performance issues they need to work on as well. Big IMAP stores are slow.

Anybody really interested in moving AWAY from outlook/exchange should dig Open Groupware, forked from a stable commercial implementation that uses Cyrus, Postgres and OpenLDAP. They even have a ready-to-run Knoppix CD-ROM image, for evaluation testing:
"The OGo Knoppix is the fastest way to get a running OGo demo, as it requires no installation - just boot from it and you get a working system, including a Cyrus IMAP4 server."

Enough with the goddam 'K' names

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop the insanity! 'Kroupware' sounds like a brand of German kitchen-utensils or something.

This is a big step forward.

[James A. A. Joyce]

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.

again not quite there

[scottking]

once again the open source community releases an exchange killer, and once again it is missing the most important component...

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

Re:again not quite there

[Grishnakh]

If you want an Outlook connector, go write one yourself.

This product was not written by some vague "open source community" at large. It was written by two consulting companies who were contracted by the German government to provide a very specific solution using open-source components, and that's exactly what they did. The German government will not be using Outlook on their client machines, so they sure as hell are not going to fund development of anything to do this. If it's so important to you or others, you're free to write it yourself or fund development with your own money. Or you can buy an existing solution from Bynari for a lot less than an Exchange system.

Namecalling

[skurken]

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.

Hey come back here with that!

[Graymalkin]

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?