I'm looking for some recommendations on a groupware solution for a small company of about 15 people. 100% free/open-source, shared calendaring and tasks in addition to mail is the primary concern, of secondary interest is the ability to use Outlook clients and ActiveSync to mobile devices.

I've had a look at Scalix and Open-Xchange so far and kinda gave up after an out-of-the-box setup didn't work on a clean CentOS box.

I did take some time to poke around some of the other threads here, but that really only left me more unsure than when I started!

Hello tgerbert,

zimbra seems to be an interesting alternative. I didn't test it, but I plan to do soon as possible.
It has a good list of features and is mature enough for a small company (and to bigger ones too).

E-groupware may be interesting too, but when I tested it (about 1 year ago), the integration of the calendar with kontact/evolution has failed (Outlook worked). ActiveSync I didn't try.

I tried Zimbra on a Debian box, and was rather impressed with the ease of installation and setup. OK so reading the documentation first was a big help, and their documentation is very complete, they even accepted a support call from me witha question about installation of the community edition.
Once I completed the install of the OS and started the Zimbra setup and config, it took me at most 45 minutes to complete.. that was installing the packages, dependencies, configuring the settings and starting to add users. They did a nice job of putting Zimbra together


You need the ZCS Connector for outlook (paid component) if you want outlook to fully integrate $$$
http://www.zimbra.com/products/deskt...atibility.html
http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?tit...nstall_Process

Alternately you can just use the Ajax web client in Zimbra, which seems to have most of the functionality of Outlook.

Or use a standards based mail client like Thunderbird with Lightning (calendar) with the community edition
http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?tit..._%26_Lightning



There is also Mobile sync support, but only in the enterprise edition. $$$
http://www.zimbra.com/products/zimbra_mobile.html

Alternately Mobile users can access the mobile web interface in the community and Paid editions.
http://www.zimbra.com/products/mobile_web_browser.html


Still their pricing is not bad, they are willing to work with you if you want to go with the Paid versions.

Can you tell I really liked what I saw ? I encourage you to try the Online Demo, and once you are hooked, do a trial setup on a Centos box, and I think you will be pleased.

And no, I do not work for Yahoo/Zimbra

Any idea where I might find some HOW-TOs configuring cyrus / eGroupWare? Their respective documentation is lacking at best.

btw,

I took a look at Citadel, seemed okay but I wasn't particularly impressed. Although, it did install & run without much fuss.

Hi tgerbert,

Sorry, I don't know any howto about cyrus and egroupware together.
What I can remember is that you need to setup the mail module to use the imap server.
So, you only need to configure the cyrus-imap correctly and point it in the mail's preferences.
Is possible that you will need to change the altnamespace option in imapd.conf to keep the folders at the same level as Inbox folders. The other way, is to keep the folders in a hierarchy below inbox (I dont know wich option egroupware prefers).
Another possibility that you may need to change the encryption option to starttls or no encryption if you have self-signed certificates.
Thanks for the tip about citadel, I'll check it.
I tried zimbra some days ago but it failed when I did configure it to check an external imap account. It cannot handle a self-signed certificate and I don't want to disable the encryption.

regards,

Tulio Munhoz.

I would really suggest zimbra even though there are proprietary components you would likely have to buy.

Interesting bit about Citadel is this however-- It's based off the bbs software I used in the late80s-early90s (the first place I was a sysop actually.) You can still telnet in and have a fully functional bbs system accessible with all the other stuff on top. I was pretty amazed by it when I saw it and it does have some nice features, but I don't think it's going to be the easiest thing to setup nor fulfill the requirements posted by the OP.

Haha... didn't think I'd ever see the terms "BBS" or "sysop" again!

I didn't realize that's what Citadel was, I'll actually have to take a closer look now!

It did install, up & running in a matter of minutes though, gotta give it that!

Thus far I'm liking eGroupWare (although that seems a royal pain in the butt to install/configure) and Zimbra.