[UFO Chicago] Personal Groupware server

[Ian Bicking]

Larry Garfield wrote:
> At bare minimum, I'm looking for an IMAP mail server to move my 2 GB 
> mail archive to and be the receiving end of an MX record for my domain. 
>  If that's all I'm going to do, then just apt-get apache php postfix 
> uw-imap (or other suggestions?) squirrelmail.  No problem.
 >
> However, I'd prefer to setup something to server-sync PIM data as well, 
> hence the interest in a groupware server.  I also would just like to be 
> able to say that I've successfully setup and run a groupware server, 
> even if the only group is me. :-)  I'm really not interested in 
> something web based except as a backup (squirrelmail being fine), as 99% 
> of the time I'll be accessing data from either Kontact or a Palm.
> 
> I'm not familiar with WebDAV, beyond the fact that it's highly complex 
> and is the underpinning for a dozen other things rather than a protocol 
> one uses directly.  Isn't it?

It's not that complicated -- it's basically a file share that runs over 
HTTP.  Of course, you don't have to have a file system on the other end, 
which is where it gets interesting (e.g., Subversion can use WebDAV as a 
protocol).  But it's easiest to use it for file sharing.

Systems that use multiple files might work well with WebDAV -- for 
instance, something that stores an address book as a bunch of vcard 
files.  The Chandler people are trying to build most of their sharing on 
WebDAV, but it's not clear to me if there's many currently successful 
programs that do this.

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