Discussion on:

SolutionBase: Build an open source groupware solution with eGroupWare

Since the author is so experienced with opensource groupware suites, I would love to here what he thinks of how eGroupware compares to Zimbra - the current heavyweight in "open source" groupware. i use the term "open source" loosely with Zimbra because they don't use the GPL and restrict some features as proprietary, which is why I have kept my distance from it. I've kept my eye on eGroupware just because it is more "open" than Zimbra, but Zimbra looks to have a nicer experience for the end-user and its Zimbra Desktop will be an awesome feature when it goes gold.

Rankin Law Firm, PLLC

Our law office uses egroupware exclusively running on an openSuSE server. The elegant php/mysql backend cannot be beat. We have used egw since 1.0 and are now on 1.4.002 svn. The package is bullet proof, backups of the data are handled by cron at any interval you specify. Moving egw from machine to machine on server update is a simple matter of creating a mysqldump of the data and then reading the data back in on the new server. We have never lost a bit of information. The support and development rate of egw is fantastic. The community and list server are equally vibrant.

I too have tried many different groupware packages until I found egw. I haven't bothered to look since.

For many businesses the holy grail of e-mail is BlackBerry integration. This must include contact synchronization as well as the other BB features. Do any of these open source apps support these capabilities out of the box??