Topic: Should SME server become a groupware distro?

[christiaan]

I have a question for the forum. Having looked at OpenExchange and how difficult is is to get it working on a distro. Should SME server become an groupware distro?

[Peter]

Some work in progress at the moment but a long way to go as yet.

[MSmith]

NO, SME should NOT *become* a groupware distribution, it is most excellent for what it does and should continue improving existing services.  If teams want to extend SME by providing contribs that add groupware flexibility, fine; but locking the community into one groupware solution would be a disservice, IMHO.

[calisun]

>NO, SME should NOT *become* a groupware
>If teams want to extend SME by providing contribs >that add groupware flexibility, fine

I don't think that the answer should be a definite NO. But I agree and I think that there should be a better way of organizing teams that work on different contribs, that improve not just groupware but other extensions that make SME a force to be reckon with. And who knows, maybe even put Microsoft out of business  
I know that there are a lot of people that request different functionalitys, but people that work on SME don't have time or interest in a lot of the requests. If we had different teams, we might get functinalities that there is no chance of getting them now.
Besides you know the old saying, Q:"how do you eat a big stick of salami?" A: "One slice at a time"
Break it up, so people that are really interested in a certain functionality, might be able to contribute at least couple lines of code, versus nothing if they get overwhelmed by seeing this big SME salami in front of them.
How about having something like sourceforge, but only focused on SME "SMEforge"?

[sbcc]

Bump:

All being said... I think an SMEforge is a great idea... lets people check on the status of projects and provides a single place to find things...

As for groupware... No groupware package should be presented as the only solution...  That being said, I'd love to see at least one installed by default and opengroupware seems like a good choice.

Perhaps having a place (webpage, etc) where you could see all available "blades" (sorted by "certification status... fully tested and approved, beta, etc...) and let the SME manager select them individually and then they are automatically installed...

...thoughts?

[gordonr]

Bump:

All being said... I think an SMEforge is a great idea... lets people check on the status of projects and provides a single place to find things...

Yep - that's what we have in mind:
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=27611.0

As for groupware... No groupware package should be presented as the only solution...  That being said, I'd love to see at least one installed by default and opengroupware seems like a good choice.

Personally, I'd like to see less in the base, and more as downloadable packages. However that should wait (IMHO) until the GForge/yum infrastructure is stable. It will then be much easier to pull non-core things out of the base.

Perhaps having a place (webpage, etc) where you could see all available "blades" (sorted by "certification status... fully tested and approved, beta, etc...) and let the SME manager select them individually and then they are automatically installed...

...thoughts?

You might care to look at 7.0alpha. It includes a "Software installer" panel, which allows easy choice of packages or groups (yum equivalent of the "blades" concept above).

The infrastructure is there. What we need is more testing, and for contribs to start being packaged as groups. We hope that the introduction of GForge will make that relatively easy.

Gordon

[SharifGeorge]

I have over the last couple of years tried, as much as I can, to steer clients away from DOZE to open source solutions.

Over the last couple of months I have had to remove two boxes as the clients requirements outgrew what the box was able to provice vis-a-viz groupware.

Now I am not talking the Exchange tpe of thing here but more like a simple shared calendar facility combined with their email.

I want a calendar for me and one for us.

I think this would add about 45% additional usefulness to the distro.

BTW - For what it does it's great I don't reccoemend anything else if I can avoid it.

Sharif

[gregswallow]

There is a calendar app that works along with webmail.  It's called Kronolith - http://www.horde.org/kronolith/

For SME6, there are rpms here:
http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/dmusty/SME6.0/webmail/

Check out http://www.loftmail.com/ for a demo of what the newer version of webmail (like what is in the SME7 Beta) can do when all the other modules are installed.

[SharifGeorge]

Just wondered what you are using for the shared disk storage and also if that is being rolled into sme 7.0?

Sharif    

[gregswallow]

The web file storage module is called Gollem.  It won't be in SME 7.0, but it can be installed and configured manually.  Search contribs.org for 'gollem' for more info, you'll find an rpm I made for SME7 that will install it, but you'll have to do the configuration yourself so far.

[snowch]

YES! SME should most definately implement a better groupware solution - and open-xchange does look to be the best.

Most small business customers who want an all round server solution prefer Microsoft small business server because of it's groupware features.  The SME severly lacks in features in comparison.  The only 'real' differentiator in the favour of the SME is cost.