Saskaweb IT Solutions is currently investigating open-source groupware applications as part of our goal to offer an opensource alternative to all of our hosted Microsoft services.  The first package we reviewed is EGroupware.  EGroupware is a PHP/database driven website that offers a wide range of groupware services.  Unfortunately, it does not appear to fulfill our groupware requirements because of weaknesses with client synchronization.  We want a drop-in Exchange replacement that would ideally work with Outlook, or at least something like Thunderbird.

First let’s start out with what’s good about EGroupware:

1. Very active development
2. Already has a ton of features and being PHP, should customize easily
3. Community driven (this project appears to embrace the best of open source ideals)
4. Supports mail authentication (authenticates off existing IMAP) making this a drop-in replacement for our existing webmail
5. apt-get install egroupware.  Wow — now that’s easy to install!

As mentioned, the big bad is that EGroupware doesn’t really work with Outlook and if it did, it sure wouldn’t work with Outlook 2010, and if it did it sure would be flaky…. You see where I’m going.  This level of support for Outlook is a serious mark against EGroupware and what makes it a dealbreaker is that there don’t seem to be any Windows email clients that work reliably with it.  Admittedly, I’m going off of forum reports and did not exhaustively check all combinations but if we’re going to recommend this to our clients it has to work well and I did NOT feel that.

We will start offering EGroupware as a webmail alternative for our email hosting because it does have a ton of features.  As for an Exchange alternative though, not at this time

Tags: egroupware, exchange alternative, webmail
Posted in Sysadmin Tales