eGroupware + Debian + c903

Install

Lenny Packages

These are the 1.4 packages, and they’re easy enough to install and get running. There’s a problem, though: they don’t support SyncML 1.2, and there are gaps even in the earlier versions. Since my phone wants 1.2, this pretty much renders them a non-starter. There are probably other features missing, but this is the one I care about most.

If you don’t need 1.6 features or SyncML 1.2, these are almost a no-brainer—except for a dumb packaging decision that actually prevents the package from passing its installation tests; there are hacky work-arounds that involved replacing symlinks with copies of the package-managed files they point to, but they also mean you’ll need to re-run the copy everytime you upgrade (unless you enjoy not having security patches properly applied).

Lenny + Backports

Lenny backports have the 1.6 series, which, combined with Jörg Lehrke’s SyncML patches would give me the full SyncML 1.2 support I want. Unfortunately it has even more of the packaging problems that afflict 1.4, including a dangling symlink to no-where.

This is… sub-optimal.

Bespoke Install

I’m not actually a big fan of bespoke installs these days—it’s too easy to overlook security updates and the like, and it’s, frankly, too much like work. If you’re being paid for it, great, but if it’s for a personal project, meh. It helps if the application in question at least bugs you about updates, but still. Meh.

That said, given the package non-features or broken-ness, this looks like the best options; moreover, a bespoke install would give me a version of 1.6 with Jörg’s patches included in the mainline. Win!

Install is pretty straighforward: download two tarballs, untar in your favourite local software point, and configure as normal via the PHP interface.

Configuration

Pretty straightforward; give it a database to log in to, and away it goes, merrily configuring itself. I’ve actually been pretty pleased with the ease of config for most PHP apps I’ve been playing with and using of late; PHP has largely replaced Perl as the language self-styled “Real Programmers” love to hate, but from an integration perspective I find the PHP world is full of applications that have convenient and well-thoughtout installations. Perhaps that’s because I’m only using ones written by people smart enough to support more than one database installation.

Use

Mail

FelaMiMail and Dovecot appear to have some issues; when I first tried the mail app I could see my Inbox, but I couldn’t see any of my folders. A bit of digging about revealed I was not alone; happily, Jonathan was able to work out what the problem is and hack a workaround together in the absence of any official fix.

Works like I charm, but I suspect I won’t now be able to use uw-imapd as alternate accounts for users. This does not bother me overmuch, but worth considering if you want to be able to mix and match.

Other than that, mail, well, works like mail. You have a decent AJAXy webmail client; spell checking, signature management, and multiple account management work well; IMAP with SSL works, and it feels reasonably snappy. One bonus is that since the address management is going to be the hub of managing “people I know” the client probably hsa more people aggregated into it than most webmail clients I’ve used.

Calendar & Schedule

The calendar component was the key component, so it’s the most important one to have working well in this picture. It does, although some functionality is non-obvious at first.

You carry around a personal calendar, and you can invite people to events as you’d expect from a modern groupware calendar; there are groups, and one of the nicer features is the ability to show stacked calendar views which include the other members of your group.

You get a lot of view options; as well as the aforementioned group planner, you get a standard mix of daily, weekly, and monthly views. It understands public holidays to a pretty sophisticated level (last Monday of the month, on the the 5th unless it’s a weekend then next Monday, that sort of thing) and can export or import them as needs be (bonus points for the Department of Labour for making the public holidays available in iCal format).

Notes and tasks are supported alongside the calendar.

Address Book

The addressbook is a nice, straightforward tool. It’s what you’d expect, with the ability to tag decent amount of metadata to contacts for ease of slice-and-dice, multiple addressbooks, distribution groups, and pretty much everything you’d expect from a decent, modern address management tool.

One of the nicer mass-action features in the toolkit is the ability to merge contacts, deleting the redundant copies; it’s even smart enough to prioritise contacts who are in eGroupware when doing that merge.

SyncML

This is the gold bit for me; the instructions cover the main databases available, and just as with the Funambol server, the Sony Ericsson C903 SyncML client Just Works with only a few small caveats - for example, while I was delighted to discover my phone will auto-populate the eGroupware addressbook with photos from my Contacts database, if I update the record on the server and resync, the phone loses its memory of the photo. D’oh, but only a cosmetic d’oh.

(I did, as an aside, have an evening’s pain fixing up the mess made when I used syncevolution with it; the client and server failed to recongnise common contacts and doubled them up rather than merging the contacts with the same name and details. I am not sure whether this was a PEBCAK or brokenness in syncevolution.)

Aside from contacts the calendaring, again, just works. The first sync populated everything as I’d expect, and a subsequent flurry of Maire and I inviting one another to parties and events has lead to my phone carrying a great deal more accurate representation of the state of my life.

Other Data

As well as some more specific syncing mechanisms (Thunderbird, iPhone, blah blah blah), you can get contacts and calendar data in and out via vCards and iCal easily enough, which makes it easy to, say, dump Facebook events into eGroupware and then manage them further in eGroupware.

Configuration

There are more options than you can shake a stick at; the key features I’ve noticed is giving the administrator the ability to chose between setting sensible defaults, which the users can override, or to force settings; that capability goes down to per-parameter settings.

The downside of this is that the configuration options are both broad and deep, and drilling down to the ones you actually care about can seem like quite the trial as you get used to discovering where things are.

Overall

On the one hand eGroupware has way, way more features than I’ll likely ever need or utilise on a personal basis. Files management, samba, wiki, knowledge base, FAQ engines, you name it, it’s in there. But&mash;and this is probably the most praiseworthy aspect—it scales down very nicely. For my key needs—shared calendars, contact management, clientsync—it works very nicely indeed.

Probably my only significant criticism is that some UI elements are non-obvious or have non-sensible defaults; one example would be notification of invites to events, where by default, nothing happens. When you poke about it turns out there are options for emailing links, pop-up window notification, and suchlike. But when you first start inviting people it’s a little opaque as to how they’re supposed to know what’s going on.

A secondary would be that I don’t like pop-up windows for things like editing mail or contacts as much as the suite does—but that may be behaviour based on elements buried deep withing the configuration system.

But other than that minor complaint, I’m pretty pleased with how it works so far, although I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s available, and likely won’t (filesharing, perhaps, but the Wiki and project management tools? Not so much).