I first want to congratulate the developers and bug testers. This project is showing a lot of promise. I have a few thoughts I would like to share. Groupware has be become a rather ill defined term that describes, email, calendaring, address book, resource sharing and any thing else under sun. Many people are looking for a sub set of these features for their uses. As a long time GNU/linux user, I whole heartedly believe in the fundamental principle of do one thing and do it well. Caldav is a great protocol and is showing a lot of promise. SMTP/IMAP/POP are all industry standards with very robust implementations.
After working with bongo for a week or two, I have some thoughts about the project I would like to share. 1) I really like the web interface work. It is by far some of the best available, especially in the caldav realm. It is clear, modern, and polished. 2) Being a seasoned postfix admin, I find the email server offerings to be very sparse. There are some very advanced and stable MTAs that exist, as well as, very advanced spam scanners. 3) A similar thing can be said about the IMAP/POP3 server. 4)There doesn't seem to be an address book feature implemented As I am active on a few other projects, I understand how valuable the time is of a developer. I feel that re-inventing an MTA and IMAP/POP3 server is not the best way to utilize that precious time. There is a tremendous void, especially in the caldav arena for viable web interfaces. My feelings are that trying to offer a specific set of groupware abilities is going to limit the success of the project. Further, most groupware abilities have very strong projects supporting them. Email: Postfix, Sendmail, Qmail, Exim IMAP/POP3: courier, dovecot, cyrus caldav: davical, bedework, cosmo, apple calendar server - This section is, of course, the weakest, as the standard is a relatively new one Most of the calendar servers, either have antiquated hard to use interfaces, or use resource intensive technologies that are difficult to maintain. It looks like Bongo has a very good start, using commonly used technologies to deploy a sleek and easy to use web interface for calendars. I can't confirm this, as the documentation is a little sparse, but it seems that it is more than trivial to point the bongo-web package at another server. It is difficult to define what services a general office will want. A "do-it-all" project, unless it fits perfectly into the office's wants, will often be over looked. As consultants, we generally use/support projects that focus on one thing, whether it is LDAP, SMTP, calDAV, etc. I would love to see bongo shift its focus toward developing modules for a web interface to interact with standards-compliant servers. This is a tremendously important hole in the community at large. Thank you for your time, keep up the great work. - Munroe _______________________________________________ Bongo-users mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/bongo-users
