enterprise management / groupware / document management / customer portal

[Lachlan Musicman]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 07:46, Patton Echols <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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.

To be honest, I think you will find it difficult to find something
that fits all of your criteria - I think the most important thing now
is to find out which functionalities you _definitively_ want
integrated into the same package, and which softwares you are happy to
run separately - eg, I've not known a FOSS groupware solution that
integrated OCR yet.

> 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?

My initial advice is: egroupware isn't fantastic. The situation we
were in was less business oriented, but we found the RoR project
Redmine http://www.redmine.org/ to be a better fit, and filled the
software gaps around it. In particular, the calendaring coupled with
it's gannt chart etc etc. Other plus's are that it's more modular than
egw and is built from a framework, so you can get most desired modules
built, at a cheaper cost I would suggest than having it integrated
into something like egw.

Obviously, depending on req's google has a fine suite of softwares
available too (email, docs, etc)

The problems we had with egw were: speed of software, speed of dev,
confusing interface

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