enterprise management / groupware / document management / customer portal

[Patton Echols]

Greetings

Can anyone share their experience or insights to suggest enterprise 
management/groupware that can be run on an Ubuntu server?

Please note:  I am way beyond the "check the repositories for 
egroupware, phpgroupware, citadel, {your choice here}" answer.  Use case 
and some explanation below.  A bit long.

I am attempting to provide some support to a group that wants to start a 
consultant business with very little in the way of funds.  The business 
will have multiple customers and the deliverables will be documents and 
advice.  Initially, there is no intention to have a brick and mortar 
office, each of the players will work at home.

I am looking for some advice about enterprise management/ groupware 
options to run a "virtual office" for these folks.  My best source of 
info so far has been opensourceCMS.com and I've probably run about a 
dozen of the online demos.  They are limited, though and I can't really 
get the flavor for how they work or if they can be configured to suit.  
My hope is that someone here will have some direct experience or some 
other thoughts about how I might analyze some of the possibilities.

Here are the basic desires for functionality:

Web browser based for intra-net or https connection so that users can 
work remotely within their browser. Obviously they'll need separate 
software to produce their output whatever it may be.

Should be Project centric where, within a project, the users can:
     - Set and track tasks
             - by date or dependencies
     - Calendar events and deadlines
     - Contacts module within the project,
         -  categories of contacts including "Customer" who gets the bill!
     - Time keeping and billing
         -with timer?
         - allowing hourly or flat fee billing on an arbitrary basis by task
     - Communication: phone logs and emails
     - Notes tracking
     - To do lists
     - Document Management
         - OCR
         - indexing
         - versions
Wish List:
     - Customer portal.
     - messaging between users
     - mobile sync

Should be multiple user, each user with the option of a "dashboard" view 
where a user can see their individual calendar, coming due events /  
task . (or other useful views?)

All the modules should be searchable, not just by project.  (Example 
search for a contact . .)
The frontend should be PHP or something that is reasonably hackable to 
configure / brand.

Concerns:
Given another recent thread, the customer portal is probably a separate 
function and should probably run on a separate server and not have 
direct access to the internal database.

In the repositories I've found a number of packages.  When using the 
term "groupware" most mean MSOutlook / exchange server replacements, but 
without the project orientation or the time and billing or the document 
management functions.

While I have been doing research for a while, I have not installed any 
possible candidates because the installation  and configuration and 
testing appears to be non-trivial . . . and then some.

Of the demos that I have looked at, eGroupware seems to be the closest 
fit, and is in the repos.  But some fairly important functions seem to 
be missing from the community version.  Also in the repos, phpGroupware 
and Citadel.  But I am not opposed to building from source if there is 
somewhat of a "howto."

So, those who have read this far, thanks for taking the time.  Any 
thoughts to share?  Other questions about what I am trying to accomplish?

Thanks,

--PE