Group ware solution needed

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 22:39, Chris Ruprecht wrote:
> 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.


> Here are the requirements:
> (1) Server based email

This is built into almost every distribution.  I'd recommend adding
MimeDefang (http://www.mimedefang.org/) to control server-side spam
and virus scanning.  Even if no one runs windows it's best to drop
anything identified as a virus at the gateway so users don't have
to deal with them.

> (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)

Dovecot is probably OK for 10 people and easier to configure than cyrus.
Either way, if you have the version of outlook that comes with MS office
you can do client-side rules that apply to outlook mailboxes.  If you
run MimeDefang/spamassassin on the server side you can add a header with
the spam score to allow individual decisions about filtering.  The one
thing you probably need to do with procmail, though, is to set up
vacation messages. There is a reasonable interface for that in the
usermin part of webmin.  You really don't want people doing outlook
rules for autoreplies because it is too dumb to avoid lists and loops.

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

Openexchange is supposed to work and be cross-platform.  If everyone
runs exactly the same version of outlook you can export the free/busy
times to a shared directory but you can't mix 2000/xp/2003 versions
because of incompatibilities.

> 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.

You can supply a filing cabinet, but it is up to the user to put the
document in the right file.   A wiki with file attachment capabilities
like twiki (http://twiki.org/) is a good way to combine documentation
and descriptions with access to the files but since there is some extra
effort it takes a certain critical mass of user interest to get it
going.

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

You might want to look at Centos as the platform.  It's not a big jump
from fedora and you can expect updates longer without needing a
re-install.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com