Groupware Evaluation

[Leah Cunningham]

I was contemplating giving a talk on this as opposed to LDAP, as planned 
sometime in the future as I've been doing lots of evaluations, installations, 
etc.

Their article is pretty honest about the state of things.  I have mostly 
focused my attention on OpenXChange, Zimbra, and Scalix.  Ultimately, I ended 
up sticking with OpenXChange.  It is very difficult to install by hand, but 
there is some good documentation out there, and many folks have now written 
installation scripts that make the installation process quite simple 
(especially for CentOS 4.x).  I use it on both SUSE and CentOS platforms.  

The biggest win with OpenXChange is that it allows you total freedom on the 
back end.  You are not tied to specific versions of anything besides the Java 
servelet code base.  You can impliment various LDAP/MTA/IMAP backend 
combinations.  That means you can use the OS provided packages and security 
updates, unlike Zimbra.  Scalix is closer to this model in that you use the 
OS provided packages, but it is not flexible in terms of letting you chose 
alternates to it's preferred MTA (sendmail), etc.

I have also tested the Outlook connector, and it works quite well, (there is a 
license fee.)

The community is a little hard to find, but is quite responsive once you find 
them.  The forums are good, there is an IRC channel, and the wiki, while 
ugly, works.

The main downfalls of OX are that it could use some updates to it's legacy 
Postgres and LDAP schemas.

Also, imo, it is a bit too dependant on the DB for some of the groupware 
features.  However, it does mean that it tends to work even if you back end 
servers are missing some features.  The other thing to note is that because 
it is legacy, it is, at least proven and in production software.  The 
original SUSE OX project was started around 1999, iirc.

Another problem is a lack of nice web based mgt tools.  I've been working on 
one that is rails based for OX, and am looking into thee possibility of 
virtualmin integration (would work for dovecot IMAP, I think).  However, as I 
need domain level admin support, and none of the products I have mentioned 
have it, it kind of doesn't matter.  Zimbra provides this feature in their 
commercial version, but not the OSS version, which does make it tempting.  
Scalix doesn't seem to have the feature yet.

Anywho, there's my 2bits + half a shilling.

Leah

On Wednesday 19 April 2006 22:03, Christopher Browne wrote:
> Here's an interesting summary article of an organization that did some
> evaluations of OSS "groupware" packages...
>
> http://www.itwales.com/997890.htm
>
> It seems quite a mixed bag; a lot of the systems are quite severely
> hindered by the "we may call it OSS, but that version isn't properly
> supportable;  you *actually* want to buy licenses from us if you want
> to use it" problem.
>
> I'm not sure how current it all is, but it seemed consistent with the
> way things were the last I took a look at it...
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-- 
Leah Cunningham : d416-585-9971x692 : d416-703-5977 : m416-559-6511
Frauerpower! Co. : www.frauerpower.com : Toronto, ON Canada

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