over 3 years
ago
Excellent Groupware/Collaberation Platform
by
whitemice
After a very long time considering and testing various groupware and collaboration platforms, including considering commercial solutions such as Domino/Notes, I started using OpenGroupware. It has proven to a robust and enterprise ready solution. This is not a glorified PIM with some collaboration trappings as most of the Open Source groupware solutions seem to be. It is a real competitor of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft
... [More]
Sharepoint.
While ohloh indicates that development has slowed, I don't think this is true. Incremental improvements are added regularly and the number of developers has also increased lately - but OpenGroupware is very complete and descends from a commercial product that was under development for seven years before going Open Source. So relative to the size of the code base there are few changes, primarily because this is a very mature project.
OpenGroupware's weaknesses are (1) rough and lagging packaging and (2) a web interface with a somewhat antiquated appearance. But neither of these impedes functionality.
There are also significant developments related to interfacing from both mobile devices and fat clients (including Novell Evolution and Mozilla Thunderbird) primarily via the GroupDAV protocol.
OpenGroupware provides an API for integrating with other packages - and one of the shops I work with is using OpenGroupware as a backend to a sophisticated CRM interface. The ZideStore service provides access to files and projects via WebDAV, and using either WebDrive on Windows or FUSE on LINUX you can actually mount your groupware server as a drive/share - how much more integrated can you get than that? File management in projects provides both versioning and lock/release.
For programmers the ZideStore service itself can be extended through the creation of bundles if none of the RPC mechanisms provide sufficient access/functionality.
OpenGroupware uses your existing IMAP/SMTP mail infrastructure, including support for vacation and server side filtering if your mail server supports SIEVE (Cyrus IMAPd). [Less]
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