Need an opensource groupware project

[EyeMWing]

We can't afford Exchange, and we won't even look at Lotus Notes.

That leaves us with the Opensource community.

Of all the projects that I've looked at, Opengroupware appeared the most complete, most usable. Until I went to install it. Our intranet server, the target machine for this, is running Ubuntu Linux. "Oh, we're going to release ubuntu packages when we release v1.0"

They're on 1.2. No Ubuntu packages in sight. The Debian packages work on Ubuntu with the "minor" issue of not actually working. The solution? "Use Fedora Core."

First and foremost, telling a system administrator, even of a small organization, to change his operating system is the WORST thing you can do. And no, I won't add another box for this so I can use a different OS, because that makes documentation a nightmare - and increases the learning curve for everyone down the road.

And beyond that, Fedora Core is presently at version 5, and has been for awhile. They only have stable releases that support Fedora Core 2 and 3. They have snapshots that support Fedora Core 4. Nothing for 5.

So, either I'm going to turn our in-house development team loose on this problem (which would be interesting, because we could make a lot of productivity optimizations unique to our environment).

Also, an opensource document management system would be really, really cool.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Searching for groupware on freshmeat.net gives 86 hits. I'm not sure how worth while any of them are though...

 

[EyeMWing]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Searching for groupware on freshmeat.net gives 86 hits. I'm not sure how worth while any of them are though...

Went through a bunch of those, and the only ones with the featureset we need are incomplete.

*sigh* And I thought I was going to have our devs working on something more specialized, instead of reinventing the wheel.

 

[kami333]

Did you take a look at Open-Xchange (or Openexchange, one of them is bundled with SUSE or something with support, the other is free, can't remember which is which). I was evaluating it in my free time (on a OSX server, that was a bit of a hassle to get working) a while back before we ultimately went with an Exchange server.

 

[nsafreak]

Ok so they don't have install packages for Ubuntu that kindof sucks. But why not install it from source? Yes it's a bit more of a pain but I've found installing most packages from source nowadays realy isn't all that hard.

 

[EyeMWing]

Originally posted by: nsafreak
Ok so they don't have install packages for Ubuntu that kindof sucks. But why not install it from source? Yes it's a bit more of a pain but I've found installing most packages from source nowadays realy isn't all that hard.

I could do it, but then I'd have to document it twice (once now, in case they never rectify that problem, and once later, when they fix that)

Originally posted by: kami333
Did you take a look at Open-Xchange (or Openexchange, one of them is bundled with SUSE or something with support, the other is free, can't remember which is which). I was evaluating it in my free time (on a OSX server, that was a bit of a hassle to get working) a while back before we ultimately went with an Exchange server.

Now THESE look promising. Especially Open-Xchange. No packages, but after playing with the online demo... Building from source is very, very much worth it. May I ask why you went with Exchange?

 

[kami333]

Originally posted by: EyeMWing

Originally posted by: kami333
Did you take a look at Open-Xchange (or Openexchange, one of them is bundled with SUSE or something with support, the other is free, can't remember which is which). I was evaluating it in my free time (on a OSX server, that was a bit of a hassle to get working) a while back before we ultimately went with an Exchange server.

Now THESE look promising. Especially Open-Xchange. No packages, but after playing with the online demo... Building from source is very, very much worth it. May I ask why you went with Exchange?

We got a new boss😉

Originally a lot of the computers we were using were OSX so Exchange with Entourage had it's share of issues, with shared calenders etc, so we were looking for something more cross-platform. Then we got a new IT manager who was all about Windows and Windows servers so the decision was made to change everything to Windows so we basically stopped needing the compatibility and then it seemed like we had a bottomless IT budget. I think our hosted Exchange was running us somewhere around $1500/month for 60 accounts, the long term goal was to bring it in house and integrate it with AD and Sharepoint. Personally I thought the timeline on it was a bit optimistic.

OX has a lot of documentation available for compiling and installing on different distros so that might make your life a bit easier.

 

[MrChad]

Zimbra?

 

[WildHorse]

oops