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.