Lisa and I are looking for Groupware to use in our new ventures. That’s a fancy way of saying calendar and todo list. We don’t need webmail because I do have secure SMTP working. (I’m using two mail servers, one for incoming, and one for outgoing)
In the grand tradition that everything we do has to push the envelope, we need multiplatform and roaming capability. Also Exchange server is way too rich for our blood. It seems to finally be working, but would set us back quite a bit for everything we’d need to make it work.
Anyway, I’m looking first at free and open source. PHPGroupWare makes all the right noises, so I downloaded and tested it. The listing at SourceForge says version 0.9, beta quality. It’s really not. To me beta code is fundamentally working, but can be expected to have bugs, possibly big ones. Alpha on the other hand is feature complete, but has holes and known bugs. It’s really only useable by the developers and well trained demo jocks.
PHPGroupWare is alpha. The docs suck. I never got a lot of it working at all. The last straw, the thing that made me call it alpha and walk away is that the application installer only works once. Let us say that a novice sysadmin decides only to install mail, caledar and todo list at first. All is well. So he then adds daily comics and homebrew recipator. (Two items of personal interest). Noting happens. After much cussing and muttering, he uninstalls and reinstalls, this time putting in comics and recipator. All is well. Being a novice only at PHPGroupware, he immediately tries adding two more applications. Nothing happens.
He then uninstalls PHPGroupware and continues looking.