Nice to meet you! I've spent 4+ years working with TWIG, which is really one of the best web based groupware solutions around ;-) Although it isn't yet part of the stock TWIG distribution, I've written additional features which have in fact replaced Exchange at two sites. It is likely that these pieces will appear in TWIG 2.8, although I can't say for sure as we've only begun the 2.8 development cycle.
The pieces of the puzzle you have cited aren't all that complex, really. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) comes ready-to-go on most modern distributions, and there are numerous quality books (both dead tree and online) to get you going. Sendmail or Postfix also come mostly configured, however the latter is quite a bit easier to get working (and hence the preferred MTA for use with DBMail). LDAP is (pardon my Dutch ;-) a royal pain in the ass to get working the first time around... but here's the rub if you're looking to replace Exchange 2000: *keep* the Active Directory. The LDAP authentication patch which I've posted to the list over the past few months is, in fact, specifically written with the AD in mind (although it should work just fine with most other schemas, as per dbmail.conf) At the moment, I don't feel that DBMail should try to become Exchange in all of its intricacies. It's enough to be the first open source project to seriously provide for email in a database. Adding a SOAP interface is an interesting idea, however. What you're basically saying is that the paths taken by phpGroupWare, Horde and TWIG can all be joined back together. Rather than each of us defining our own databases for Contacts, Scheduling and so on, we could all share a single SOAP specification for which DBMail is the backend. Very interesting indeed! Aaron On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Dan Kuykendall wrote: > is anyone working on this? > > I have spent the last 3+ years creating and continuing development of > phpGroupWare, which is really one of the best web based groupware > solutions around. > However, its hard to create a direct competitor to MS Exchange server > from coupling linux+apache+php+mysql+sendmail+ldap together and tossing > phpGroupware on top of all of that. its a rather tough setup and it > still does not provide a client side/offline app. > > We are working on ways to solve the client side issue, but none are very > far along. > > dbmail is a very cool mail server, and can solve the issue of sendmail, > without the need for ldap and seperate socket connections by some php > code. Since we can hit the database directly instead. > > Im not sure how things should all be put together, but I think that > having a SOAP interface to dbmail, and then starting to add other data > services such as a way to store ical records for calendaring... > > Im mostly interested in finding out who else is interested in working on > this. > > Dan > > _______________________________________________ > Dbmail mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail >
