SOGo: Thunderbird-inspired and Thunderbird-compatible Groupware

david — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:07:56 +0000

I’m slowly learning about the world of groupware, which I’m thinking for the moment as access to shared resources (folders, address books, calendars) and coordination features like meeting scheduling. It’s a world which is dominated by Exchange, especially in North America and especially in companies, especially in larger companies. There are alternatives, however, including some which have some interesting ties to Thunderbird. One notable such project is SOGo, which stands for Scalable OpenGroupware.org (not a great name IMO, but let’s judge a book by its title . SOGo came to my attention for a couple of reasons — first, because they built a web front-end to their system which is a fairly close clone of the Thunderbird UI, second, because the same team built an extension to Thunderbird and Lightning to add support for more groupware-ish features like access to free-busy information. I’m hoping that the SOGo team and the Calendar team will be able to join forces to make both projects stronger. They’ve just announced their second RC of version 1.0, so if you’re interested in this kind of project, do check it out.

Shared contacts, the cheap & cheerful way

david — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:22:19 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write more about groupware and collaboration, and hopefully will find the time for a longer post on the topic, but here’s a bit of timely news. Ludovic Marcotte and friends have just released a combination of some of their previous extensions to Thunderbird and Lightning as something they call the SOGo connector: it’s an extension to Thunderbird which, when combined with Lightning, provides features like remote address book through CardDAV (sending vCards through CalDAV, AFAICT), and an informal protocol called GroupDAV. While CardDAV is an extension to CalDAV which is an IETF spec, GroupDAV is currently an ad-hoc, simple protocol built to let clients interoperate with open source groupware servers, which probably explains both why it’s simple and why only a few servers (including SOGo, of course) support it.
I still need some education as to what relevant standards have to say (even in non-final form) about shared contact lists. More on this topic later I’m sure.

david ascher » collaboration

SOGo: Thunderbird-inspired and Thunderbird-compatible Groupware

Shared contacts, the cheap & cheerful way