On Tue, 6. February 2007 12:06:00 Verner Kjærsgaard wrote: > Dear list and gurus :-) > > Say you have an organization (a school) with 15 teachers. All using > SuSE10.2/LTSP4.2 and Kmail. Every teacher has his own list of contacts > (E-mail adresses) in Kmail. > > This is not easy to handle. > > Can Kmail either self or indirectly make use of a remote, centrally managed > adressbook or something? > > If not, any recommendations as to a good OpenSource groupware webbased > thing? > > Other suggestions?
AFAIK in the moment there is no SUSE based Groupware Server which offers autoinstalled and preconfigured groupware functionalities out of the box which is free of costs. A good and IMO the best and very powerfull server distribution which will fit your needs is the former SUSE Open Scchool Server (OSS). It is still offered and supported by Extis a german company. They also adopted its future development. IMO OSS is the most powerfull Linux based Server solution for education environments and the needs of a school you will find. There is a free (of cost) evaluation version at: http://www.extis.de/oss_eval.html precisely it points to: http://www.schul-netz.de/dh/?pfad=/openschoolserver/OSS2.0/iso Don't worry that it's primary documentation is in German, nevertheless it is one of the best documentations in this field I'm aware of. And not to forget Lars Rupp and Peter Varkoly (in alphabetical order ;-) are very competent people behind it. On the long run the costs for update, installation and general support are worth one's salt. As mentioned by Will Stephenson I also would vote for a KOLAB based groupware. There is a free (of costs) Debian based groupware server distribution offered by univention Germany. Since end of last year univention offers it as free downloadable distribution. The univention groupware server (ugs) is targeting the needs of a professional environment in a company. But IMO it is also worth a closer look: http://download.univention.de/download/ucs-cds/ucs1.3-2/ (as mentioned in a German article in c't, the leading IT publication in DE, the installation of ugs should be done after the ucs (univention coorporate server) is installed first. This avoids some configuration steps which have to be done if ugs is installed alone. Due to the fact that ugs is based on ucs a later installation of ugs will only add the groupware functionality. german article: http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/79250 ) As for OSS support for ucs is offered for cash. And as said for OSS it is worth one's salt too. So which one will be the best for your needs? + OSS comes alon with a lot of features which will be of interest for your students, e.g. a web based forum, special preconfigured groups for teachers and students which enables a taylored permisson policy for each group (e.g. internet access for students, class based permissions, age-group (german: Jahrgang) based permissions). + OSS is configured and administrated via yast2 as in Opensuse (+) The integration of opensuse workstations is well documented. (+) because in the moment I don't know if it is available in English. + OSS is developed for schools + UGS offers KOLAB2 as groupware solution, which IMHO is better than the one in OSS. + UGS is free of costs - ugs is not primarily targeting the needs of a school + both offer full groupware support for GNU/Linux, Windows and also MacOSX + both offer the perspective to have students accounts (-) both are documented in German only. (-) because as far as I know I've installed both OSS and ugs in a couple of schools and youth centers ?youth clubs? (german: Jugendzentren). Both of them work like a charm! In the end the staff people's preference / knowledge for either suse or debian was the reason for a decision in the end. The lack of a German documentation of both OSS and ugs offer a big chance for your school. You may enter the Linux hall of fame and claim the merits to be the first who made one of them available for native english speakers, worldwide, if you will find a way to translate the documentation. May be it might be of interest for a german course at your school? regards, thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
