enterprise management / groupware / document management / customer portal

[Patton Echols]

Wow, It has been a long time since this reply.  I do appreciate it and 
have been pondering.

On 02/06/2011 03:29 PM, Lachlan Musicman wrote:
> 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.

That's a good point.  I think the basic is to have something where the 
user logs in and has options.  (1) Can choose project view.  Default is 
a list of projects (filtered optionally?) Click on a project and you get 
a view of status, linked documents, associated people (anyone in the 
address book) (2) can see their calendar with a list of due tasks. 
(Including roll forwards)  Click on a task takes you to a project. (3) 
user can see their message logs, for example that "so and so" rang up 
and are owed a ring back, a click links to both address book, but also 
the project associated.  (4) If searching the address book and find a 
person, can find the projects linked to that person.

My guess is that a solution that does the above, would do enough of the 
rest to at least be extensible.  Time and billing is a concern, but most 
of the solutions I have looked at have some facility built in.

>> 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.
>
  I looked at redmine.  It's demo seem to be too one dimensional.  So 
you can have a project, but not link people (except "users")   But I 
realize that demos are problematic.  Given my list, is that something 
redmine could handle?

Thanks,

--PE