Group ware solution needed

[Chris Ruprecht]

Hello all,

I have received a request from a friend of mine to provide him (and his
10 people company) with a Linux based server that also gives them a
group ware solution.

I was initially thinking of Lotus Notes, but it refuses to run under
Fedora and doesn't play nicely under RH 9 either (I have been testing 4
different Linux-en all day long).

I googled around and didn't come across anything that looks remotely
promising.

Here are the requirements:
(1) Server based email
(2) Server based calendaring for all their people so that they can
schedule meetings and know when all the other staff members are
available
(3) Server based document storage

Their workstations are Windows XP, they have a number of business
applications for which there are no equivalent Linux versions.

The solutions I have in mind are:

for (1): sendmail/cyrus-imap/procmail;
the problem here is that there is no easy way to add rules for procmail
in a way an end-user understands mail filters. They can just about grasp
the concept of mail filtering when they use POP3 (POP3 is not an option
here, though because they want to be able to access their server mail
from anywhere)

for (2): I have not found any solid open-source calendar tool for this.

for (3): I can make shared directories available through SMB but that
just moves the Word/Excel/PDF/whatever-else-format-file chaos from the
workstation to the server. Trying to find a specific document amongst
the 1000s of arbitrarily names files is near impossible.


Any open-source solutions that run under Linux (FC3/FC4 preferred) are
welcome.

Best regards,
Chris