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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."
How well does it do compared to EX-change?
IOW: is it a "Komplete" software product, or the usual 90% GNU solution?
Does anybody care to write a compairison feature and integration wise?
OK, so the KDE project started Kontact, which merges KMail, KOrganizer, KNotes, and KAddressBook. I was just at the Kontact web site and it doesn't mention Kolab. My thought was that Kroupware was supposed to merge at some point with Kontact, is this true? But Kolab screenshots look different than Kontact's. Is this going into KDE?
http://kolab.kde.org/
http://kontact.kde.org/
In other words, is Kontact dead?
Kroupware? There is an Open Source product whose that is going head to head against major proprietary mail server packages, and someone actually thought to call it 'Kroupware'?
Is that like 'HackingCoughWare' or, perhaps, the more subtle 'ScreamingInfantWare'? Ok, perhaps this is a troll, but I've historically had a hard enough time selling open source stuff into various enterprises. ("MySQL? Aww, what a cute name. Now go get us something that sounds professional." I've heard that. Literally. Twice.) I realize we're all smart enough to know better.
Selling a product is as much (if not more) selling an image than it is selling features, reliability, etc. At least for the PHBs I've had to sell to in the past. Trying to bring a mission critical piece of software in that's named after an anoying childhood malady will, before anything else, elicit a bunch of laughs from the powers that be, and then there's that much more of a hole to dig out of.
... but all those apps that begin with K become a real nuisance to find on KDE's version of the start-menu when you're a Linux newb such as myself.
"Derp de derp."
But I do not want to use Outlook at all. Evolution or Mozilla will do just fine for say, everybody. Plus, talking about free/FREE - why is everybody prepared to pay big bucks to Microsoft or Oracle but not to some other company for said Outlook connector, if they really want to use Outlook? That would be heaps cheaper option.
Kroupware and the others are nice. But what we really need is for CALSCH http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/calsch-charter.h tml
to finish with CAP http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-cal sch-cap-10.txt . As you can see CAP is on it's tenth public revision.
We need a standard that specifies the transport of the calendar protocol, badly. We need CAP finished.
The special folder in IMAP scheme will work. But is a little on the hackish side, and incompartibility between servers is a serious problem, even with standard formats, like iCal based schemes.
Next we need a cross platform messaging server. Although, it does not support IMAP as yet, Apache James is my favorite, at http://james.apache.org. First of all it has a strong group endorsing it, the Apache group. That's going to be important for selling this thing to risk-adverse corporate types. Second, it's Java, so I trust it a little more in the buffer-overflow department. Also it would probably integrate nicely in current J2EE setups. I've heard people are doing this.
James needs IMAP and CAP support. And then we will have a decent shot at the less entrenched sector of the exchanges market.