RE: Suggestion for SME...

Hi Klaus

> 
> ...seems to me like there _are_ different ideas on "what is 
> e-smith?" around... looking forward to seeing feedback from 
> other people here.
 
E-smith/SME is as the name says Small and Medium Enterprise. You ideal
user base is 100 users but you have 20 or less or even 500. What I am
looking for is additional functionality. To provide an MS-Exchange
alternate. If you uses can away from the Exchange licenses and still
have the exact functionality + more would be great.

Technically it's possible, wether it is a feasible project, still needs
to be decided. Do we hack e-smith to work with kolab or hack kolab to
work with e-smith.
 
> I perfectly agree on that: all in one box. As soon as you decide to
> split this up into two boxes I'd rather take the gateway and firewall
> function to another box and have e-smith do all the rest instead of
> stripping e-smith down to its gateway function and setting up another
> box to replace all the other functions of e-smith.

But there are other projects out there like this already e.g ipcop and
smoothwall.

> Personally I like solutions that give the user the chance to use a
> standalone client over a web based solution. It's good to have an
> optional web interface - but most users want to keep their client
> application (which normally gives them a better user 
> interface anyway).
> 
> Now I know neither kolab nor egroupware in detail. To me it looks like
> eGroupWare (currently) only has a web based interface whereas
> kolab (as you've mentioned before) tries to interoperate with outlook
> seamlessly. I think it's much easier to convince people to 
> change their
> backoffice tools than to make them change their desktop tools.
> Offering a solution with less capabilities makes it even harder.

I agree, egroupware appears to be like many other web-based solutions.
They are all pretty good except for the fact that it is a tough sell!
Kolab also has a web-based solution using horde.
 
> 
> 
> IMHO only the first option should be discussed here. I 
> wouldn't see, why
> the second option is not a good idea - but this would simply 
> not be the
> right place to discuss this.
> 
> 
> Regards, K.
> 
> -- 
>   Dipl.-Ing.(FH) Klaus J. Mueller
>   http://internet-sicherheit.net
> 


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