RE: [phpgroupware-developers] probusiness introduction

[Christian Böttger]

Hi Dave & all,


> From: Dave Hall [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Monday, April 07, 2003 11:58 AM
> To: address@hidden; Christian B öttger
> Cc: team-applications; Jens Gogoll; Kai Dupke
> Subject: Re: [phpgroupware-developers] probusiness introduction
> 

[...]

> > The first example is the project pb.WebMAUI 
> > (http://pb-webmaui.sourceforge.net/ (German only, unfortunately)), 
> > whichprovides an administration interface for the Courier 
> > mailsuite and some patches for Horde/IMP. Currently, there is only a
design study 
> > available for download; we are finishing a stable version and will
release that 
> > hopefullythis month. pb.WebMAUI is already in commercial production use
at a
> > customer.
> 
> phpGroupWare is very different product to that produced by 
> the Horde/IMP Project.  

Very true. Horde/IMP is used only as a webmailer, the rest of the Horde
framework is unused. Well, and it's Horde/IMP in that case because the
customer insisted on it.

> At the same time courier is a very nice IMAP server.

Yes, and the maildir format is rather nice for many purposes as well as the
server-based filter capabilities.

> 
> We look forward to your contribution to the project.  Commit access to
> our CVS respository is not automatic, there are some requirements to be

That's clear.

> met, these are spelt out at  http://docs.phpgroupware.org/developer.php .


Thanks, we already had a look. We'll try our very best to meet these
requirements.


> When the code is published we will look at it, if it is up to 
> scratch we will include it.  I would suggest that you look over the docs 
> contained in the following URLs:
> 
> * http://www.phpgroupware.org/wiki/DeveloperDocs
> * http://docs.phpgroupware.org/ - some are some what dated - but you
> should get the idea.

We'll do that, thanks for the links. 

 
> I would suggest initially you start your own wiki and we can set it up
> as a interWiki to link the docs into.  

We'll do this as soon as time permits. It might be that we start first with
a normal WWW page and move things into a local Wiki later.

> Our wiki is currently for our
> developers, but we are happy to link to other wikis if they provide
> receprocial interwiki links, like we have done with the axiswiki ( see
> http://docs.axisgroupware.org )

We'll be happy to provide reciprocal links.



> See above about CVS access, I have no issue with any developer gaining
> CVS access if they meet our requirements.  Alternatively, you 
> can submit patches for our consideration -
http://docs.phpgroupware.org/patches.php .


We'll do that first. Then we can decide on the next steps afterwards. But,
as we are still in concept phase, don't expect bigger amounts of code too
soon.

> That would be nice, and it would be good if they could drop in at
> #phpgroupware on irc.freenode.net too.

They are free to do so in the spare time from home if they wish (but of
course not obliged to do so), but unfortunately (as Kai Dupke pointed out
already), an IRC access will not be possible for them from work for security
policy reasons.

> Integration is a great aim, it is something we are working towards too.

Yes, it is. Without it, we can't sell services; and that's what we're living
on.

> Not only of apps, but of projects.

Exactly the point. pb.Mailserver is such a "marketing name" for one of the
integration projects we did: it's a combination of Courier (IMAP + Maildirs
etc), OpenLDAP, a slightly modified Horde/IMP, pb.WebMAUI as admin tool,
AMaVis + some virus scanner, combined with appropriate hardware (in one case
e.g. four double-CPU Intel servers, combined into two high availability
clusters running under LVS (RedHat Advanced Server).

Quite a lot of our customers appreciate this integration work.

But of course, we have to specialize: pb.WebMAUI e.g. works only with
Courier, not qmail, postfix or sendmail. Of course, it could be expanded,
but as long as there's no customer for this, we can't really do it. On the
other hand, some funtionality of pb.WebMAUI (server based filters, "vacation
messages") can be integrated in a customized phpGW version, which could use
these features, but in combination with Courier only.

> Looking forward to hearing more from you and the probusiness crew.

Thanks!

:-)



Regards

Christian


-- 
*****    Open Source und Linux im professionellen Einsatz    *****
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Dr. Christian Böttger                  Teamleiter Softwarelösungen 
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