email/groupware solution ?

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 19:58 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 08:02:42PM +0100, Marcel Janssen wrote:
> > On Monday 13 March 2006 11:51, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > After some investigation I ended up with opengroupware as a
> > > candidate. It looks like people had been successfully using it with
> > > dovecot. I'll be packaging it up at ATrpms (maybe in the testing
> > > section).
> > 
> > It would be great to have these at ATrpms.
> 
> OGo is quite nasty, one effectively needs to replace half of objc (and
> half as in "half the package" ...). From a developer's perspective OGo
> chose some funny infrastructure.
----
that appears to be the case with Zimbra and Scalix as well

The one that appears to function within the various distribution
packaging is Kolab but that imposes restrictions upon which packages and
if I recall correctly the choices are Postfix and Cyrus (not a bad
choice though). Kolab doesn't have a web client though and
Horde/IMP/etc. is actually the suggested web client. Kolab also has
support for fat clients Kontact (I think...KDE) and there are Outlook
connectors that I think will work too (optional/extra).
----
> 
> > I haven't tried dovecot and didn't even know it existed. I'm actually stil 
> > figuring out how to get mail working well. Thanks for pointing this out.
> > 
> > > I also like horde a lot, but the integration with other clients like
> > > evolution's calendaring isn't there, and having a web-only calendaring
> > > is sometimes bothersome.
> > 
> > Correct, but in my case it is only useful when I can have this on both windows 
> > and Linux and I think evolution doesn't run on windows or am I wrong here ?
> > Having evolution on Linux and another client for windows would also be fine 
> > though.
> 
> As far as I checked at least for Outlook all open source projects need
> a "connector" that is not free. E.g. there is no open source solution
> to connect Outlook to a group calendar. But you may argue that since
> Outlook itself is neither open source, nor free, that this is just an
> extension of the restrictions you have to put up anyway with Outlook.
> 
> I don't know if there are any good open source mail/calendaring
> clients for Windows at the league of evolution/outlook.
----
I'm not sure that the combination fat client implementation of
Evolution/Outlook is all that lofty of a target - they are really
personal information managers and extending their functionality beyond
the scope of the single user into a collaboration environment is handy
but problematic. It's not the worst concept in the world to separate the
functionality into separate applications.
----
> 
> In my case it's only one Windows user and he will be always connected
> to the net. So a good Web-UI would suffice. The Linux user group would
> have to be more flexible, so evolution is giving the possible
> solutions.
----
web applications have an amount of universality to them that a single
client application doesn't - especially when the single client
application is proprietary and cannot be altered. Thus, what you might
lose for one class of clients, you gain for all classes of clients and
from my perspective, it's not only acceptable but desirable. The web
application is the future and the fat intractable client application is
rooted in the past.

Craig