Spotlight on open source for business: Adam Williams on OpenGroupware.org

How has the Enterprise market reacted toward OpenGroupware.org, so far?

OGo has been well received by its target market: those wanting to add a robust groupware featureset to their Intranet and in-house applications.

SOGo is still pretty new, but it is used by some very large hosting facilities. Given that SOGo targets central groupware applications -- share calendars and address books -- and provides good connectors, it is currently attracting a lot of interest.

Let's say one decided to quickly move their groupware solution from Exchange to OGo -- over a weekend, for example. What kind of changes would end users notice on Monday morning? Would there be much of a problem for them to re-adjust to this new groupware system?

Most Outlook users would probably notice very little difference. The basic functionality of address books and calendars is more or less the same. Some "advanced" Exchange-plus-Outlook features would be lost, such as Outlook Forms. I'm not aware of any Open Source platform that supports Outlook Forms.

Obviously, the Web interface would be different, and mobile device support works somewhat differently. I doubt most end users would need much adjustment. But it all depends on what features of Exchange a site was exercising. Users would gain document management capabilities not offered by Exchange.

What technologies have been difficult to implement into OpenGroupware.org, whether technically or due to proprietary restrictions? How have you overcome this (or have you)?

Clearly the interoperability with Microsoft products, specifically Microsoft Outlook. MAPI and other proprietary Microsoft technologies are a constant issue.

What are your initial thoughts about Microsoft's recent release of its protocol specifications? Does it look like this will this help you guys?

I haven't read the agreement, but I know that it does not cover collaboration protocols like calendar sharing, etc.. So I do not believe the agreement is relevant to the groupware space.