[UFO Chicago] Personal Groupware server

[Ian Bicking]

Larry Garfield wrote:
> I will soon be setting up a new server for my home network.  If possible 
> I'm going to setup a full groupware server on it (why?  Because I can!), 
> so I'm looking for suggestions on which to use.  The system itself will 
> be running Debian Sarge.
> 
> The only one I'm familiar with generally is Kolab, although I've not 
> used it myself.  I do NOT want something that is primarily web based, 
> although having a webmail front end to fall back on is a plus.  For 
> efficiency I'd rather use maildir than mbox for email storage.  I want 
> to use Kontact as the client at home, and then just general IMAP access 
> elsewhere that doesn't support Kontact directly (like on my Palm).

What are you really looking for?  Groupware usually means groups, and it 
sounds like you're just doing this for yourself.  If it's just email, 
then an IMAP server will work fine.  I've used dovecot with mbox, and it 
might also support maildir; I had used uw-imapd, but found it to be 
totally opaque when it didn't work (but easy when it did work).

A lot of the webmail clients use IMAP natively; squirrelmail is one 
that's packaged with Debian and easy to set up.

Maybe a WebDAV server would also be useful; this is easy to set up with 
Apache and mod_dav.  Usermin includes some web-based file management 
stuff.  I personally don't know what is good for an address book, and 
even less so for calendaring.  I think there are some tools that work 
ontop of WebDAV (dumb server, smart client).  And a ton of PHP web-based 
calendars and address books.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org