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Exchanging Exchange

Posted on 20 Dec 2005 at 15:29

Simon Brock and Ian Wrigley try to find a drop-in open-source replacement for Exchange Server

OpenGroupware.org doesn't provide an email server, but it does have a built-in client for reading and composing email that will work with any IMAP4 or POP3 mail server. Since most Linux/Unix distributions come with at least one mail server (frequently Postfix, a very powerful and configurable package), this isn't an issue and could be seen as a benefit - choose your own server and configure it as you see fit, rather than being locked into one particular product.

OpenGroupware.org provides all the features you'd expect to see in a groupware package, including a contacts list, task list (to-do list), projects list (encompassing a number of tasks and participants) and a group calendar. The calendar is where much of the power of OpenGroupware.org comes into play. While viewing your own calendar, you can also view those of others (assuming they've given you the privilege), you can set 'events' that apply only to you, or 'appointments' and 'meetings' that involve other users of the system. While you're doing this the system will display timeslots that are open on all users' calendars, so you can schedule events without conflict or send out 'proposals' to other users to which they can respond as they see fit.

OpenGroupware.org is available as a binary distribution for various Linux distributions, and source code is available for compilation on other Unix platforms such as Solaris. Our only real quibble is that right now the software uses PostgreSQL as its back-end database and doesn't interface with MySQL. Not a huge issue for many people, but we use MySQL extensively and don't want to have to install another RDBMS on our systems, especially since we've invested a lot of time becoming expert in configuring and tweaking MySQL to get every ounce of performance out of it. Still, for many potential users this won't be an issue.

phpGroupWare

phpGroupWare is a groupware suite written entirely in, as its name would suggest, PHP. This makes it ideal for users who want to tinker with the source code and customise it to their exact requirements, since there are hundreds of thousands of PHP developers out there. The system provides an infrastructure for over 50 web-based plug-in applications, including calendaring, address book, projects manager and to-do list. Again, since the software is entirely written in PHP, it's relatively easy for an organisation to either customise an existing plug-in or write one from scratch for any specific requirements.

Since the system is PHP-based, it will run on any PHP-enabled web server, and it supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, among other back-end databases. There are over 50 plug-in applications available, from fluff like weather displays up to more substantial elements such as a complete trouble-ticket tracking system.

Our only real concern with phpGroupWare is that the project seems to have stalled a little - much of the documentation is now more than a year old, and the development roadmap hasn't been updated for over a year. On the other hand, the software works and the source code is available for anyone to modify, so it may well still meet your requirements.

eGroupWare

eGroupWare is definitely a promising contender. The demo site shows that the software features collaborative calendars, projects and all the other bells-and-whistles you'd expect. It's also written in PHP, which again means it should be relatively easy to extend and configure the application to your requirements. However, the main website is rather difficult to navigate around, and some of its pages are just missing. (It doesn't help that although http://egroupware.org works, at the time of writing www.egroupware.org didn't, despite many links to that URL on the site.) eGroupWare is well worth checking out, but be warned that you may have to do more fiddling about than you'd like.