Thanks Bret, unfortunately these don't meet the need. Kolab is not FOSS,
providing "collateral results of the following commercial activities:
Uptodate, tested and supported packages for specific distributions can be
ordered from the Kolab Konsortium" (http://www.kolab.org/download.html),
and there are many other Commercial open source companies doing similar
things. phpgroupware is FOSS, but a web based monolith with the same
problems as eGroupWare in that respect.
What FOSS needs is an analogue for Exchange, a back-end calendar server
with a nice open API supporting free/busy, including to native user
interface applications like Evolution. There are many attempts at this
with eGroupWare listed on their site, making it a nice candidate and one of
the reasons we picked it, but all interfaces we looked at did not provide a
clean API supporting free/busy to the Gnome standard email application,
Evolution. So we are building one around RFC 2445. Any help very welcome!
Bret Busby wrote:
On Sun, 6 Jul 2008, Wm Stewart wrote:
Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:40:39 -0400
From: Wm Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [discuss] Bundle Evolution with OpenOffice? / Need for
Free/Busy
Hi, the main issue here is not email, contacts, or calendar
applications, it is the need for a calendar server, providing the
backend to support free/busy functionality so that teams can collaborate.
Contacts and Email and Calendars need to talk together. There are
increasing numbers of solutions to that - let's say the three leading
ones are Evolution, Thunderbird/Lightening, and eGroupWare. However,
only eGroupWare provides the "table stakes" to credibly provide
solutions for organizations, because only it can provide the simple
analogue to Outlook/Exchange meeting functionality so many people are
familiar with, "free/busy" functionality to find open times available
among teams.
If you don't wish to use the complete eGroupWare solution including
its web email interface, perhaps because you are using Ubuntu with
Evolution so nicely integrated, I'm unaware of any other FOSS
options. Groupwise works very nicely with Evolution, but it is not FOSS.
We have looked at FOSS solutions, and have decided to build an RFC 2445
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt compliant interface between
Evolution with its nice front-end that understands free/busy
functionality, and eGroupWare which has a good server and FOSS
community behind it. This will provide pure FOSS native free/busy
functionality from Evolution.
I joined to let you know about freeopensourcesoftware.org, but there
might be more synergy. Of course we will be releasing our interface
as FOSS. Comments, suggestions, and developer offers to help, very
welcome!
Cheers,
Bill
From a slightly different perspective here (as in, different to my
wanting Star Office 5.2 revived :) ), as a user of Debian 4.0, using
Synaptic, I did a earch on the term "groupware", and (as usual) got many
responses:
kolabd
"
groupware server
Kolab is a secure, scalable, and reliable groupware server. It consists
of a number of well-known and proven components for the standard tasks
such as e-mail, directory service, and web service. Kolab adds
intelligent interaction between the components, a web administration
interface, management of free/busy lists, etc. Various clients can
access Kolab, among them Kontact (KDE), Outlook (Windows), and Horde
(web).
This package contains the groupware server program, the LDAP gateway
daemon, as well as the dependencies and documentation to run Kolab.
Web site: http://www.kolab.org/
"
kolab-resource-handlers
"
Kolab free/busy scripts
This package contains scripts for the free/busy feature of the Kolab
groupware server.
Kolab is a secure, scalable, and reliable groupware server. It consists
of a number of well-known and proven components for the standard tasks
such as e-mail, directory service, and web service. Kolab adds
intelligent interaction between the components, a web administration
interface, management of free/busy lists, etc. Various clients can
access Kolab, among them Kontact (KDE), Outlook (Windows), and Horde
(web).
Web site: http://www.kolab.org/
"
phpgroupware
"
web based groupware system written in PHP
phpGroupWare is a fully web based groupware system. It includes
applications
such as email, calendar, todo list, address book, file manager, notepad.
This is only the base package, the modules are shipped separately in
packages named "phpgroupware-<module>".
"
There are many packages listed for phpgroupware.
Perhaps, if people are seeking software to do specific office-related
tasks, like this calendar/scheduling thing that indicates whether a
person is busy or free, they should use their package manager, to search
for the functionality. It may already exist and be available.
But, I still think that Star Office 5.2 should be revived.....
:)
--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............
"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992
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