A better website for Kolab

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A better website for Kolab
by Charles de Miramon on Friday 28/Jan/2005, @07:42

Thanks Fab for this very nice interview.

Kolab looks like a great project but the weak point is marketing. Intevation should make some effort before the release of Kolab2 to revamp the Kolab website, have a much clearer message to what Kolab is about, scrap all the stuff about Kroupware, Proko2 that are more internal cooking that something you wan't to communicate on.
I don't know which is the best between OpenGroupware and Kolab but OpenGroupware has clearly much better marketing.

Cheers,
Charles

Related Links

·   Articles on Interviews
·   Also by Charles de Miramon
·   Contact author

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by Urks on Friday 28/Jan/2005, @12:40

Actually the Kolab server and OpenGroupware.org are complementary. Since Kolab server is just a Cyrus server / Postfix MTA plus an LDAP setup, OpenGroupware can use it as a regular backend. There are setup guides for that on the documentation website of OpenGroupware.

Then of course is the question why one would want Kolab server at all since all those daemons are standard on any current distribution anyway, including polished configuration interfaces (like YaST for example). The requirement to turn of the system daemons maintained by your favorite distributor in favor of packages patched by "someone" seems rather outdated?

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by Andreas on Sunday 30/Jan/2005, @08:58

Please read the concepts behind the groupware solutions before posting. Both solutions target the same areas, but the technical concepts are different. It is correct that the integration of Kolab in a universal services machine (ftp, http, mail, cvs, whatever) is difficult, but Kolab is made for larger installations where you'll have dedicated Kolab server anyway. There you won't worry about other deamons.

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by me on Sunday 30/Jan/2005, @19:56

I've read about that, too. From the paper it looks like Kolab is targetting fat-client installations (web interface near to impossible due to offline IMAP4 requirement) with 100.000 and above (overkill for installations <1000?). On the other side the only reference which uses Kolab seems to be the German BSI which sponsors the whole project. BSI might be some hundreds of users at best and certainly doesn't count as a "larger installation".

Are there actually any _large_ Kolab installations? I suppose it would be really great if some references (besides BSI) would be posted in the followup article! So far it sounds like a university research project and I guess people wanting to switch from Exchange are curious about real world examples!

PS: for a large installation I would rather ensure that the mentioned services are maintained by one of the bigger Linux companies which have sufficient resources to ensure proper QA, like in SLES 9 or RedHat AS (or Debian if you want to go for free).

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by Carlo on Tuesday 01/Feb/2005, @08:07

>BSI might be some hundreds of users at best and certainly doesn't count as a "larger installation".

The german authorities do have "a few" hundred thounsand employees...

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by me on Tuesday 01/Feb/2005, @16:26

The German "authorities" do not use Kolab, only BSI is known to actually use it (as mentioned, some deployment examples would be cool for the next article). The current Linux migration guide for German authorities list a lot of groupware servers.

BTW: Besides there are no really "big" German authorities given that this is a federal republic with a lot of smaller ministries (usually some hundreds of users, only sometimes a few thousand). Quite different to for example France where you have huge ministries (with more than 100.000 employees in a single location).

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Re: A better website for Kolab
by Martin Konold on Tuesday 01/Feb/2005, @05:44

> Actually the Kolab server and OpenGroupware.org are complementary.

I know that this information can be found on the OpenGroupware website though it is incorrect. Kolab 2 is a substitute for traditional database driven groupware solutions.

> Then of course is the question why one would want Kolab server at all since
> all those daemons are standard on any current distribution anyway

Kolab has many advantages compared to OpenGroupware.

Just consider scalability, security, offline support and support for MS Outlook clients for example!

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