In order to get people to work together, it makes sense to have some form of collaboration tools (groupware) available. There are plenty of websites out there, but, well, we do a lot of proprietary development and we want to keep everything on our servers. The search for the right groupware was on. It had to be free (as in freedom, not as in free beer), should use the LAMP environment and offer file exchange, sharable calendar and maybe email.

While there are a lot of different groupware environments out there, they are all either no longer maintained, or are buggy beyond recognition or simply to weird and complicated to install.

Here is what we tried so far:

phpGroupware: I didn't like the Windows 3.1 Look&Feel but I gave it a try anyway. Installation was bumpy but doable. It wants this password for administration and that password for header-administration, another one for users and finally locked me out because I forgot which password for what and I tried too many times. As there is no easy way reset the counter (and I didn't want to wait 30 minutes) - I gave up.

Horde-Groupware: I had great hopes for this environment. Again - installation was complicated but manageable. However, after about 2 hours it ended with a PHP-error telling me that it wasn't able to get enough memory space from our servers. We have quite a few good PHP people but they were unable to trace the reason for this error. Since we didn't have the time to "patch" it, we went on to try a different solution.

TuTos: Tutos wasn't too hard to install, but they want the apache-config changed. While we are not on shared servers we would have been able to do so, but we like our apache config as it is and we believe NO php environment should require any changes to the standard apache web configuration. So - we tossed it out as well.

eyOS: The easiest environment to install, but not really a "groupware" solution. It also requires additional php modules which aren't available for all Linux flavors. It also needs quite some Internet bandwidth to be workable, which might not be available in all environments or on mobile devices. Nice - but no cigar.

php-calendar: What a mess. How is it possible to write a simple application like a calendar and manage to produce a variety of missing includes or database-errors? I start to believe that people should FIRST learn the C-programming language before they are allowed to use PHP ....

We tried a few more (see: www.codango.com/php/dir/webapps/collabor/) but some crapped out with PHP or Javascript errors and/or were no longer maintained or impossible complicated to install.

All in all we pretty much lost a day. Now - developing a calendar or file sharing tool is no rocket science. I am sure the developers and maintainers had a lot of work with their projects. But they lost KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in the process and ended up with some unmanageable complex structure.

We might have to develop our own solution now. We will make it available here as soon as we have something to show.

As usual .. just my two cents.

Michaela