Over the weekend, I took a look at EGroupWare and was immediately impressed. EGroupWare is a fork of PHPGroupware and offers, among other things:
- Email client
- Address book
- Document management
- Calendar
- Journal functionality
- Project management
- Resource management
I have now also managed to synchronize my Kontact (address book, calendar) with EGroupWare. The connection uses the XML-RPC interface provided by EGroupWare, which Kontact supports out of the box.
Anyone who also wants to synchronize their data with a smartphone or PDA will not be disappointed by EGroupWare either. For this, the system offers a complete SyncML server that works very well with Funambol. There are plenty of how-tos online.
For me, though, the great thing about this system is that I can finally connect my various data sources. For example, you can transfer a message directly from the email client into the journal. When you then open a particular contact through the address book, EGroupWare immediately displays the associated journal entries too. Phone calls can be documented in the same way.
The system only reveals its real power in multiuser operation, however. According to Wikipedia, EGroupWare is used by government agencies in Brazil with > 10,000 clients.
If you feel like it, you can take a look and perhaps customize one thing or another directly. The good thing is that the entire code is available under an open-source license.