4 OpenSource Groupware Tools

[bgerber]

Are you happy with the way your team is able to organize and exchange office data? Maybe Horde, phpGroupWare, PHProject or moregroupware will help you all become better team players.

 

[00101010]

Our organization already uses Outlook and OWA over Exchange, but I am impressed with the development of these open source solutions. I agree that for businesses with more limited budgets, these products appear to be a nice alternative with many of the features of the big named apps. I am going to try them on my home network and see how they work for me.

What would be interesting to see is how these solutions may or may not work with other items like Blackberry, Palm, or other devices.

 

[Woodie]

You might want to give Zimbra a whirl if you're looking for an open source groupware solution.

http://www.zimbra.com/

Their offering is impressive. The web interface is AJAX based, so it's quite sophisticated. They've also integrated anti-spam/virus into it.

 

[Fustian_777]

Anyone tried MS groove? They were giving away copies of it at their rollout events and it looks pretty good. It has a client version and a server version and it comes with a few editions of MS Office.

I haven't had time to look at my copy, but apparently it 'pushes' documents to group members' computers.

Any thoughts?

 

[Woodie]

Groove is pretty cool.

I'm a long time user, although not so much recently. Groove was started by some ex Lotus Notes guys who wanted to get away from centralized server based software and into a peer-to-peer model.

There is a server component to the overall architecture - but not in the same way as you'd find in Notes, or Exchange - where the server is the central storage facility. In Groove it's more of an echo, or repeater service performing store and forward duties when needed.

Some of the really nice things about Groove:

Every thing is encrypted. Everything. On disc, and on the wire - it's all encrypted. Even the server when performing as a store and forward cache, doesn't have any capability to decrypt the content. When you create your Groove account, you're creating a public private key pair similar to what you'd find in PGP. You can have multiple working aliases - so that if you want to you can separate home from work, etc.

I mostly used Groove pre-MS acquisition - but I generally liked what I saw. It was a bit sluggish - and internally (for development purposes) very XML heavy. But their bet is the correct one - PCs and the bandwidth available are only increasing in speed.

I should probably re-enable my license - I had two system melt-downs close to one another, so retrieval of my key is a little tough. Ah well.

- Porter

 

[sligh]

I am really interested in using a type of groupware. I want to be able to keep track of projects, use a calendar and up/down load files. The problem is that Im not a small biz. I just have a simple website hosted by gate.com. They list the ability to use perl/php and talk about mysql. The problem is that if I can't log in some kind of terminal I can't install it.

My question is "does anyone know of an alternative. Like a groupware like code or application that I can simply modify or compile and just upload it to my host? something that will give me the simple functions I want?

-justin

 

[ajc]

The up and coming star in the open source groupware scene is Citadel -- a complete turnkey suite. It's got all of its own data stores built in and pre-integrated so you don't have to do all that tedious mucking about with sendmail/cyrus/apache/etc/etc/etc. Just install and go. It works with all of the popular desktop groupware clients (Kontact, Evolution, Thunderbird/Sunbird, etc.) and also comes with a gorgeous AJAX-based web interface. Give it a try!

 

[sligh]

Yeah I checked this out and it looks pretty easy. My problem is not the installing of the application but more so the fact that my current hosting service does not allow me admin level control. I plan to upgrade to the next account up which gives me this kind of control.

-justin