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      <!-- <h1>JKWiki: <small>OpenSourceGroupware</small></h1> -->
        <p><a href="?HomePage">HomePage</a> :: <a href="?TechnicalProjects">TechnicalProjects</a> :: OpenSourceGroupware</p>
<h1><a id="OpenSourceGroupware"></a>Open Source Groupware</h1>
<p>This is not an easy problem to solve, unfortunately, and development languished for years (see the <a href="http://www.ietf.org">IETF</a> Calendaring and Scheduling (calsh) projects). However, in the last year, great strides have been made, mainly revolving around the German government&#39;s commissioning of the <a href="http://kolab.org">Kroupware</a> project, with the intent of having a working Open Source groupware application by December 31, 2002, a milestone that was reached successfully. This page tries to give an overview of the issues and current state of the various solutions available.</p>
<p>Commercial and/or proprietary solutions exist, but unless you&#39;re a large company and need enterprise support from the vendor, there&#39;s really no reason to pay for the software you use.</p>
<p>It&#39;s important to realize that very few people make use of exchange&#39;s functions besides inter-office email and calendar sharing. As far as calendaring goes, it&#39;s usually managerial types that insist on using it. Of course, if your clients aren&#39;t using exchange (in other words, they&#39;re just using Outlook by itself), there&#39;s little standing in the way of migrating them to something else.</p>
<p>A major benefit to using open-source email and groupware applications is the fact that the standard Windows exploits don&#39;t run on alternative software. Open source applications and operating systems are subject to merciless peer review, and as the saying goes, <q>given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow</q>. When bugs are discovered, they are fixed in a matter of hours, generally.</p>
<h1><a id="TheKolabServer"></a>The Kolab server</h1>
<p>A result of the Kroupware project, the Kolab server is a KDE application that can replace most of the functionality of Exchange. Kolab has a client that goes along with it, which is part of the KDE desktop, of course. There are various other clients that can interact with the server, such as Evolution (provided you purchase Ximian&#39;s per-seat Connector&#8230; /c&#39;mon, Novell, open-source the connector, or otherwise make Evolution operate freely with Kolab), TheKompany&#39;s (<a href="http://thekompany.com">link</a>) Aethera multi-platform email client, and ???.</p>
<h3><a id="ALookAtTheNumbersMid2002"></a>A look at the numbers (mid-2002)</h3>
<table>
<tr>
<td>Product</td>
<td>Number of Users</td>
<td>Software Costs</td>
<td>Consultant Fees</td>
<td>Total Cost</td>
<td>Savings</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Microsoft Exchange</td>
<td>100</td>
<td>$8,500</td>
<td>$2,500</td>
<td>$11,000</td>
<td>N/A</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes/Domino</td>
<td>100</td>
<td>$8,500</td>
<td>$2,500</td>
<td>$11,000</td>
<td>N/A</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Kolab Server (Open Source product)</td>
<td>100</td>
<td>FREE</td>
<td>$2,500</td>
<td>$2,500</td>
<td>$8,500</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> I was shown a quote today (July 16, 2007) for 500-seat Exchange installation, including an off-site backup server: $90,000, not including a full-time admin to babysit the thing. There simply has to be a better way to do groupware.</p>
<h1><a id="OtherGroupwareServersFreeAndNonfree"></a>Other groupware servers &#8212; free and non-free</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.citadel.org">Citadel</a></li>
<li>Open Groupware (<a href="http://OpenGroupware.org">link</a>)</li>
<li>SuSE&#39;s OpenExchange Server (<a href="http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/30/1135230&tid=163&tid=106">link</a>) &#8212; which is of course poisoned now, due to Novell&#39;s deal with Microsoft concerning patents.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a id="WebbasedSolutions"></a>Web-based solutions</h3>
<p>Since these are web-based and can run in any browser, it is trivial to allow users to roam (working from home or while travelling, etc.). The two downsides to web-based applications are that they don&#39;t integrate well with other applications (you can&#39;t email directly from another application, for instance&#8230; you have to save the file first, then send the attachment from inside the web app), and the fact that some tasks just work better if they are done with stand-alone programs that integrate with and act like every other program installed on the desktop (no drag-and-drop and heavy data entry come to mind here).<br />PHProjekt (<a href="http://www.phprojekt.com">link</a>) &#8212; excellent web groupware app. I&#39;ve used this on and off for several years and like it very much.</p>
<h3><a id="AlternativeOrAdhocSolutions"></a>Alternative or ad-hoc solutions</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://jical.sourceforge.net">Jical</a> &#8212; scours users&#39; homedirs looking for .ics files and posts them to an intranet webserver. Makes for a poor-man&#39;s calendar server.</li>
<li><a href="http://reefknot.sourceforge.net">Reefknot</a> &#8212; a perl calendaring toolkit. Unfortunately, development has stalled.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html#share">Mozilla and webDAV</a> &#8212; Mozilla&#39;s calendar-sharing solution. This is neat because Mozilla is defintely the Internet Exploder replacement of choice, and once users have realized the benefits of Mozilla over IE (<strong>effective selling points: blocked popups and tabbed browsing</strong>), they&#39;re going to be at least willing to listen to your explanation as to why you want to migrate them off Lookout.</li>
<li>My OutlookCalendarNotes</li>
<li><a href="http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239">Mozilla Lightning and Google Calendar sync</a> - nifty.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/mozilla/">Lightning .xpi files for Seamonkey</a>.</li>
</ul>

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