OpenGroupware.org

[petermcdavitt mcdavitt]

A couple months ago I posted some information about this product on the 
mailing list.  I have since had a successful demonstration for one of my 
clients and I am in the process of implementing it at this point.  Someone 
asked that I post some information about it when I can, so here it is.

If you want some information about the product, go to the website named 
above, as I am going to focus more on the things that seemed to matter most 
to a successful implementation and migration so far.  The website gives 
plenty of information on how to install it, including an install script that 
does almost everything for you.

A light background on my client...
This particular client is a healthcare provider headquartered in St. Joe, 
with 13 other sites all over NW Missouri.  Our WAN is 128k frame-relay, with 
all sites connecting back to the main clinic/headquarters.  They previously 
had a firewall appliance (Instagate), which was a linux PC administered 
through a fairly simple web interface.  This currently acts as a 
internal/external web server, pop & smtp, dhcp, secondary dns, vpn, and 
primary network firewall (we inherited this mess about a year ago).  
Obviously this is less than perfect.  We've experienced poor performance 
over the WAN when users are downloading fairly large attachments, indicating 
that we needed to explore some kind of web-based email, or buy more 
bandwidth on the frame-relays.  We were also looking for a product that 
would let us expand easily (the instagate is limited to 100 accounts), and 
have some collaboration functionality similar to exchange.  Additionally, 
this client did not want to PAY more than $2000 for it all.

It just so happened that OpenGroupware.org came about the same time.  I 
spent a few days really working on this a couple months ago and failed 
miserably.  The install process was a bit cumbersome, and at first they 
failed to mention that certain files and libraries were needed for a 
successful installation.  I gave up for a weeks to let some of the kinks get 
worked out.

I successfully installed it on the second try and found it to be 
satisfactory.  I was able to demo it to our client and they were pleased.  I 
then proceeded to apply redhat's updates to the box in all diligence, 
afterwards finding that the kernel and postgresql updates somehow ruined the 
database.

I successfully installed it again, this time without updating those two and 
it has worked fine since.  I have been working rather infrequently on 
finding a migration process from outlook/outlook express so users don't have 
to toggle back to their old email in outlook (still working on this if 
anyone has any suggestions).  This can be done if you purchase the outlook 
plugin that allows you to access the zidestore server much like exchange, 
but we we're not going to do that until they get a stable version available.

Migrating the calendar is not so hard.  If you have access to a Mac OS X 
machine (which I do), you can use iCal to literally drag and drop a calendar 
over to the zidestore server (the portion that can emulate exchange).  You 
can also do this with mozilla calendar, which I haven't tried yet.  I have 
found using the Mac for it very convenient since it can more easily convert 
the .pst files from outlook to ical.

Contacts are VERY easy.  You simply need to export the contacts as a .csv 
file and then use the opengroupware.org built-in function to import it 
through the web interface.  It can be a little time consuming since you have 
to approve each imported contact, though.

Otherwise, it has been extremely stable while I've been testing.  I was able 
to convince my boss to at least purchase some decent used hardware, instead 
of the one-way P-PII's we've had to use in the past.  It's currently running 
on a compaq proliant 1850r, dual PIII 550mhz, 1GB ram, and about 52GB hard 
disk space after RAID overhead.  For an organization that currently has a 
need for about 150 email users, and may expand to 200-300 over the next 5 
years, this should be more than sufficient.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions.  This 
process was a little rough at first, but ultimately worth it.

Peter

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