So I just spent the past couple of days evaluating for a client Horde's new Groupware Webmail bundle, and thought I'd share my experience, and see if anyone else has thoughts on it.
Here's the URL: http://www.horde.org/webmail/ Horde is a pretty cool application framework for those of you are not familiar with it. Its primary application being IMP, a nice looking IMAP client, the Groupware Webmail bundle also includes several other complimentary Horde applications: Ingo (filtering rules), Kronolith (calendaring), Turba (address book), Nag (task/todo lists), and Mnemo (notes). My goal in evaluating was mainly to try the shared calendaring tool, Kronolith. Out of the gate, unfortunately, the scripts/setup.php script (which is a shell based menu setup tool you call from php cli), would not display the menu. It would just hang. I never did get around this on my Debian Sarge box w/ PHP 5.2.2, although the menu would work on my OS X laptop. So for my staging system (Debian), just bypassed the bundle install and did the components on top of Horde individually. Once installation was done, I found that things worked very well locally in Horde. The main two problems I have not resolved regarding Kronolith are: 1) Importing iCalendar files just presents a blank screen. No PHP warnings or horde log entries. No response from the Kronolith list on this yet either. This did work on the client's Debian Etch system with PHP4, though. So I'm not yet sure what the hangup is on my system, or if it's a PHP5 issue. 2) Remote Subscription URLs (for integration with iCal compatible applications) don't seem to work with iCal or Sunbird unless you grant Guest access. However, if you put the subscription URL into a browser window, HTTP auth does work. I'm not sure what the difference is there in authentication, perhaps someone here knows. Aside from this, it's pretty cool how all these components work together. I was able to copy an email into a task list or note, and then mark it as done. Also,the portal part of Horde is *very* cool. You can highly customize the layout, and it has useful "widget" kind of things like date, moon phases, google search box, weather.com integration, fortunes, remote web page integration (great for MRTG graphs), as well as hooks into other Horde apps like calendars, task lists, etc. This was probably my favorite part of the bundle. One other application that I setup (part of the non-webmail groupware bundle) is called Gollem, a virtual file system for local storage. It's very flexible, and can talk to an FTP server, store files in SQL, or you can designate a local file system. With the latter, each user will get their own directory under it with the same name as their login, so files are segregated. And incidentally, Horde authentication is also very flexible. Since this runs on my qmail toaster, I use IMAP for centralized authentication. But you can do many other things, including LDAP and SQL. The only other drawback I observed is that being a fairly bulky group of applications, it's a little on the slow side. Certainly slower than squirrelmail. But if I can get some of the integration with remote applications working, especially shared calendars, it may be with the speed hit. Has anyone else worked with this? Any other thoughts on it? Regards, Bill Shupp
