http://www.osnews.com/story/7074/Group-Office_2_2_Pro_Review Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:31:13 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? weren't people claiming that MS was going to do this with office and that no one would go for it?

so, basically, you can run this software from a Linux server and serve it to any number of PCs. nice. Mon, 17 May 2004 19:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If it's Java based I'd consider it. In other words. If it is Active-X forget it. And it BETTER be great. I don't mean good enough. It needs to have a spell checker, Auto-Correct, etc. Meaning it better be a real word processor and not a glorified text editor. AbiWord is barely good enough, if you want something to base it on. Spreadsheet, etc., needs the same kind of quality. AND, it has to work on Linux and Mac OS X and be COMPLETELY browser independent. Mon, 17 May 2004 19:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What are you talking about? Group Office is web-based groupware. You probably didn't read the article or even clicked a damn link before you reply here. Mon, 17 May 2004 19:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Could someone compare this solution with these?
http://www.egroupware.org/
http://nullgroupware.sourceforge.net/groupware/
http://www.phpgroupware.org/ Mon, 17 May 2004 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Oh, this one too!
http://www.opengroupware.org/ Mon, 17 May 2004 19:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia,

I think that what the previous poster meant is that the WYSIWYG editor thing shouldn't be ActiveX-based (Don't know if it is). It's a good point, by the way. It would make it unusable in any browser except IE and completely unusable in any platform other than Windows. Mon, 17 May 2004 19:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? But the thing runs on Linux with simple php and mysql for crying out loud. Couldn't people _read_ before post such things? Mon, 17 May 2004 19:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hi,

it is said that it is published under the GPL license.
Isn´t it said that therefore the source code has to be published as well ? If so, does it have to be published for free ? Mon, 17 May 2004 19:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If so, does it have to be published for free ?

NO


Does the GPL allow me to charge a fee for downloading the program from my site?
Yes. You can charge any fee you wish for distributing a copy of the program. If you distribute binaries by download, you must provide "equivalent access" to download the source--therefore, the fee to download source may not be greater than the fee to download the binary.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingT... Mon, 17 May 2004 20:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? WTF are you talking about? This is a web-based application, all the PHP sources are coming with the package which you can download from Sourceforge.

What the hell is wrong with you people today? Can't you just click a link before you post? Mon, 17 May 2004 20:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia,

Now YOU please think before giving angry responses. Except for Java Applets and ActiveX components, there are no other ways to offer WYSIWYG editing in a web browser AFAIK (Of course, i might be wrong). Since it is the e-mail composing window that we're discussing, it is important for this kind of application.

Therefore, is very reasonable to presume that such feature is based either in a Java applet or an ActiveX component. Some time ago I saw something that offered such functionality without relying in any of these two, but the thing only worked with IE and I didn't bother to check why at the time.

However, this subject became too dumb to discuss any further. Mod me down again or whatever pleases you. Mon, 17 May 2004 20:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, unless I missed something, checking out the source code on the Demo it only uses JS and CSS to do WYSIWYG on the textareas, no activeX controls or Java. Mon, 17 May 2004 20:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is another to check:

http://www.moregroupware.org
http://www.phprojekt.org

I'm using the first one right now and used the later sometime ago. Changed for the support for projects. Mon, 17 May 2004 21:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? seems like a cool piece of software Mon, 17 May 2004 21:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? their is also the possibility of using Flash. Not sure how this would work out, and if it would be good, but I am sure a flash version of this wouldn't be half bad. Consider that flash is installed on most computers and is cross-platform.

I would be curious to know if a Flash implementation exists.

(Disclaimer: I am not saying Flash is the best solution, or that the other solutions are junk, just that Flash is another option, and that I am curious to know if one does exist.) Mon, 17 May 2004 21:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Eugenia, they use htmlarea for the rich text editing (in the text area).

You can download it for free here:
http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/ Mon, 17 May 2004 21:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Eugenia, they use htmlarea for the rich text editing (in the text area).

Yup, which it basically is a big js and CSS script, I still see no java or activeX controls there. Mon, 17 May 2004 21:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? We have clients using this now. Its truly amazing. The LDAP functionality is being worked on but this really is one of the 3 best open source packages in existance right now for its class. Open Groupware blows, as to many of the other phpgroupware type packages. Either too dificult to admin, clunky interface, or feature incomplete. Group-Office is basically Exchange/Groupwise/Lotus Notes online but BETTER. Mon, 17 May 2004 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? We're running Group-Office here with an LDAP user database with over 3000 users and somewhere around 700 groups without problems. But LDAP functionality is not finished yet, we're still working on the user management functions (add user/group to LDAP, modify in LDAP).
The next release (2.05 which will be released on 23rd May) includes WebDAV support, so you can access the files inside Group-Office from your local computer like they were local (tested with Nautilus (gnome 2.4+2.6), Finder (OS X 10.3.x) and m$ explorer).
Additionally I should mention that there are plans around to support SyncML and Outlook-Synchronization, but implementation has not started yet. Mon, 17 May 2004 21:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? True, but what lacks is good integration with projects. I was looking for something to administer all my projects. This is the only place where Group-Office lacks compared to other groupware solutions. Others let you assign notes, TODO's, bugtracker tickets, and files to projects.

So everything depends on your use of the soft. If you just want exchange then this is one of the bests. If you want also project management, here it lacks a bit. Mon, 17 May 2004 21:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? weren't people claiming that MS was going to do this with office and that no one would go for it?

Given that this is Microsoft, I imagine that their version was some sort of Active X thing that required the latest version of Internet Explorer, and only worked on NT platforms as Administrator, as well as doing all the processing on the client side - thus negating the entire point of such a project in the first place. Mon, 17 May 2004 22:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You will never win in an argument with a woman.
This site is a good basis for this argument.
That is all! Mon, 17 May 2004 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Group-Office has evolved so much though. Assigned and personal To-Dos are in there, samething with the project module. Take a look at it again if you haven't recently. Its really evolved. Mon, 17 May 2004 23:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Unfortunately, from what I saw on their website, their code uses (or generates) horribly outdated HTML. I couldn't find a working example of their beta software, but the example on the page you referenced was filed with FONT tags. Eeek!

Also, I haven't used this in quite a few years so I'm not sure if it includes groupware type functionality (I just used it for web based email access to my IMAP account), but how does HORDE compare to this?

http://www.horde.org/ Tue, 18 May 2004 01:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? People think "ooh it's cross-platform, it's amazing." These people have not tested for anything beyond changing the font size and perhaps making their text simulataneously bold, underlined, and blinking.

The dialog boxes cannot be gain focus (effectively locked from input) in Mozilla based browsers, Mozilla FireFox in particular. The spell-checker rarely works, and does not support UTF-8 charsets. It cannot be embedded in a table, it must have the default colors, it glitches randomly if you try to change the width, etc etc. But whoo! It's open source. Tue, 18 May 2004 01:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Stop whining. If you can do better, submit a patch or submit a bug report.

If you can't, sit around and enjoy it. Or come back in a year. I guarantee that it will be better then. Tue, 18 May 2004 02:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If and when it has PostgreSQL support I'll give it more consideration. Can anyone verify if PostgreSQL support is there??? Tue, 18 May 2004 04:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While I appreciate your typical "omg you insulted teh OSS, you suxors, why dun you do it" attitude - in fact, our business did do better. We went with a solution that was actually developed, instead of just thrown together randomly. http://www.wysiwygpro.com (hard to type URI though, bleh). Much more professional, the emails are actually answered in the forums (by helpful users and developers alike), and no annoying bugs that take days to debug (and then the developer releases a new version which fixes some other bugs, breaks your bug fixes, and introduces some new ones).

So, thank you for telling me to write something better. I find this a very typical way to deflect away any sort of criticism. Are you afraid of hearing that some open source applications suck? There is nothing wrong with letting people know not waste their time with a half-baked application like HTML Area. Maybe you should make a better comment, pfft. Tue, 18 May 2004 04:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Stop whining. If you can do better, submit a patch or submit a bug report.


Uhm, It's called XUL and it is better. Html area just happens to work in internet exploder.

(google search on 'midas') Tue, 18 May 2004 05:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? will actually flawlessy synchronize with my Palm pilot, something that is _crucial_.

A while back I was checking for all these different solutions and never really saw any that was _really good_. Once MS released outlook 2k3 (which was really a great release) they left quite a bit of the competition behind =(

It would be nice to see this change with some solutions getting better. Tue, 18 May 2004 06:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? For our purposes HTMLArea works without problems in Mozilla (Firefox) in Linux, Windoze and OS X. The only browser that seems to have problems with that is Safari. Sure there may be better solutions around, but I don't know any free ones

@Anonymous: The only thing I miss in Outlook is a eMail (IMAP!!!) client. You still cannot store sent mails in the IMAP-sent-folder. Tue, 18 May 2004 06:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? JavaScript Rich text editors can only work in Windows IE5+ and Mozilla 1.3+ or newer and derivatives on any platform. HTML Area in particular because it is so poorly coded and tested only works on IE 5.5 and up. Tue, 18 May 2004 07:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I mean IE 5.5 up & the Moz based browsers, too. I hate HTML Area, but I wasn't trying to imply that it did not work in Mozilla 1.3+ based browsers. Well it doesn't work well, but it is supposed to work at least. Tue, 18 May 2004 07:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you want to collaborative work with agenda and similar features, I think there are a lot of useful group suites for free, but if you want to collaborative work on projects on IT business or other industries that work on projects, you should see PHPCOLLAB.

It is interesting to see how similar are Group-Office and PHPCOLLAB on the look and the feature catalog.

In our company, We are succesfully running a PHPCOLLAB on the internet as a place where to collaborate with some customers in multisite and multiproject organization.

Currently we are integrating MANTIS as the complementary bug management application.

Alex Garcia
BARCELONA (SPAIN) Tue, 18 May 2004 09:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? These are some pretty cool products, the only problem I have with web based products in general is that it cuts off people (like myself) who hate using the mouse and prefer to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. It's hard enough to find one that gets the TAB order right! Tue, 18 May 2004 13:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I cannot find any information regarding the differences between the professional and community versions? I can only find that the professional version offers 'additional features'. Tue, 18 May 2004 16:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Saw the above post on http://www.wysiwygpro.com and thought I'd weigh in. My experience with this editor has been great. It's written as a PHP Class, and has a well developed API that includes the ability to access many of the javascript functions directly. VERY easy to integrate and morph it to what you want it to be and do. Like the above note, my issues were competently and quickly handled by the developers. Wed, 19 May 2004 06:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments