[KLUG Advocacy] First impressions of oGo

Adam Williams advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org
23 Jul 2003 21:25:46 -0400


We were giddy when www.opengroupware.org came online.  Real potential
killer app here.

It was potential, *RAW* potential.  Installing was scary and usually
ended badly.

But this all progresses in Open Source time.

The packages release on 7/21 seem solid.  Install is exactly
per-instructions and takes ~5 minutes.  There are probably alot of
things that should be tweaked/paritioned for scalability, but it works.

I started using it today.  My initial focus has been the task & project
management - since Evolution doesn't do that, and it is what I need. 
These two components at least are *AWESOME*.  To-Do (jobs) can
[optionally] belong to projects, projects can be associated with
enterprises (German for "companies"?).  Enterprises contain people
(contacts).  Everything is deeply indexed.  It maintains audit and
changelogs for the most anal needs.  I can upload files to projects
(very nice!).  Annotations can generate notifications, etc...

And there is a *TIMER*!!!!  For consulting this just rocks.  I can say -
I start working on this to-do now.  Then I click stop timer when I'm
done and it records the start/stop time in the to-do.  If the to-do
belongs to a project the project displays a nice summary of the
accumulated times.

I haven't gotten to far into real contact management, and I've only used
the e-mail client lightly.  But this is simply the best task/project
management Open Source app I've seen. 

And since the whole think speaks XML-RPC it should be pretty easily
extensible into other links, like say, GnuCash (which for those who
didn't know sports and XML-RPC api).

OpenLDAP authentication works,  but I haven't tested integration into
the contact management yet.  Theoretically you can pass authentication
off to Apache (this all runs through Apache), so anything apache can
auth against should be workable.

User management is pretty good, you can define templates that users are
based on.  The admin can adjust anything for the user, including their
preferences.

The e-mail client is OK, but lacking a few features I would have
expected, such as the ability to manage folder ACLs - but then it is
Open Source, so wait a little while.

Palm sync works, over IP; there are both Linux and Windows clients.

I haven't down anything with ZideStore/WebDAV yet.

Nor I have done much with the calendering portion.