Linux Groupware Frustrations

I was asked to look into groupware for a grant project. Okay, I know there are several freebies out there that shouldn’t be too hard to set up. So I looked around and did a little reading and saw that really, it was hard to choose. I mean, there are some that are not well developed, but beyond some threshold, its hard to choose without actually using the thing just to see how it behaves. So, I started installing them on my laptop to play around with.

First came Horde. It was easy to get installed and launch so presto! I had it going and liked the webmail interface immediately. Much better than SquirrelMail (which isn’t bad, but in this day and age, it’s a little too basic). Then came the real test. Adding new users. Oops, can’t do that with IMP (the mail plugin) controlling logins. Have to change to use something else. Okay, I want a database backend since I’ve PostgreSQL running. Uhm, how do I do that. Can’t find the answer. I found something about a AuthComposite configuration which kind of looks like what I want. But I couldn’t quite figure out what it is trying to tell me. Frustrate, I move on.

Okay, how about OpenGroupware, aka OGo. It’s got RPM packags and a yum repository to make installation a real breeze. Well, almost. There’s no Fedora 8 repository, but the Fedora 7 will work just fine. Well, not quite just fine, but pretty well. The ogo-database-setup package hangs due to a bad test of database versions. But you can do the setup by hand pretty easily once you look at the script. After a few hiccups, it is done. Well, not quite. It would appear that when I stopped and restarted the database, it screwed up the application connections which are just stuck. So I have to restart all the applications.

Fine, it’s installed and I’m logged in as the administrator, set up an intial account. I log into that account and try to connect to my email. It doesn’t work—of course not, I’m behind a firewall that is filtering it out. Okay, log out and hmmm…. Firefox seems to have forgotten my password. Oh, OGo has used the same form labels for the email password as for the main login password defeating Firefox’s attempt to remember passwords for me. Bad OGo!

Let’s move on and set up a project. Hmm, whats’ this question about "Project Base" where I have to choose Filesystem or Database? Okay, time to read the documentation. This takes you to the Wiki. I don’t really care much for Wikis as they are rarely well organized, but at least there is something and it has a search function. Hmm, why is "New York Moving" coming up when I search for "new project"? Fascinating, the link takes me to a page on http://docs.opengroupware.org/ which displays, then redirects off to some company named (ta-da!) "New York Moving." The Wiki has been hijacked. Not just this once, but most of the search results have nothing to do with OGo. Spammed documentation is worse than no documentation. The point of a local search function is to give you local results with a higher probability of finding what you really want. The good-to-bad hit ratio with the spammed site makes Google a better bet for finding information. Okay, try the main page links which point to a user manual. Oops, broken link. Bzzzzt! Bye-bye OGo.

phpGroupware…okay not going there. The project is a year late on their 1.0 release. Looks dormant. I’m not going to whine; I’ve got a few (few?!) dormant projects lying around myself.

eGroupware…hmmm, looks good, too. And it has a yum repository so installing wasn’t hard. You have to manually create the database and user but that’s the usual PostgreSQL stuff. Point your browser at the setup page and it walks you through the configuration. That’s much better.

There are a few gotcha’s. There’s there mcrypt seed parameter you have to set. If you don’t (I didn’t the first two times, and it lets you get away with that), then "some" things mysteriously don’t work. The thing that mysteriously didn’t work for me was calendar import. In fact, after trying to import an ICS file exported from Thunderbird/Lightning, the calendar wouldn’t display at all. The error log was not very helpful in that it showed some problem that looked to be in code (I’m not starting a new project to debug eGroupware). But the Apache log was more forthcoming. It showed errors from mcrypt. So back to the configuration and set the mcrypt seed. Now calendar import works just fine thank you.

I’m not through yet, I still have to put eGroupware through its paces. But at least it is up and running and looks like it should be possible.