Raw Matter

The topic of a groupware with SyncML support is still bothering me. What are people using, and with how many users? Please tell me (I'll update this article.)

Looking around, it seems there aren't that many open source (or even commercial) projects if it should be usable on Linux (Clients, too) and be reasonable priced (which pretty much kills Lotus and similar big enterprise solutions AFAIK.). Oh, and a web frontend is an absolute necessity, too, but that's usually not a problem.

• Open-Xchange, our current solution. The community seems to be quite dead (judging by the mailing list), and what'll happen on with the commercial variants is unclear to me, but at least there's some activity. We're moving away from OX because there are too many bugs both in the groupware itself and in the SyncML part.
• eGroupWare: The top candidate to replace OX. Looks quite good, there is a very active community, recently an additional developer has joined who will focus on the SyncML part. Most of the development is, however, done by only very few people, and apparently the project is about to fork because these people do not agree. (It's not yet clear if it will come to a fork or if egw 2.0 will properly replace the 1.x branch.)

There are some other groupware projects out there, and I might do them injustice, but on a first glance development seemed to either have stalled as a whole or at least regarding their SyncML support. I know of OpenGroupware.org (last news of SyncML support from 2005), Kolab (No production quality Web frontend, and I can't find much about SyncML either), Horde (Hmm. I didn't like the classical horde webmail very much, but "Horde Groupware" might be worth another look. The status of the SyncML part is not clear, judging from the website.) and phpGroupWare (egw's ancestor, when I last looked development seemed to stall, and the information I found about its SyncML support is somewhat scant.) The open direcory project lists some more, but I haven't looked at these.

Update 2007-12-11: As promised, a short summary of the replies I got (Thanks a lot!): James Andrewartha and Gürkan Sengün pointed me to SOGo (“originally a fork of OpenGroupware.org” apparently there is an alternative Web page, too) which should support SyncML via Funambol and sports an Ajax-heavy web frontend. Cornelius Weiss (one of the egw 2.0 developers) sent me an email that crashes Kmail 3.5.8, so I'll have to look at this later (grr!), and Serge Koenigsmann points me that Funambol seems to be the SyncML software of choice. I haven't processed this information yet; expect further blog entries on this topic in the medium-term future.

Update 2007-12-13: I managed to read the mail of Cornelius Weiss now; he points to Horde and to Horde as a possible Web frontend for the Kolab server (a combination that is officially encouraged, I gather from a recent announcement by the Kolab folks. I guess I'll have to look at this possibility.

I wonder why Russel doesn't touch on system bus usage in his excellent article. AFAIK there are three main scenarios: SW-RAID, “classical HW-RAID” (RAID controller which is on the system bus as a complete unit, discs behind it) and “Add-On HW-RAID” (RAID controller is a device on the system bus which controls the non-RAID disc controllers which are also on the system bus.) SW-RAID is clearly worse than classical HW-RAID in terms of system bus usage, but I'm not sure how the Add-On HW-RAID chips compare to that - If CPU to memory bandwidth is much higher than memory to bus bandwidth they might be even worse than SW-RAID (RAID 5/6: transfer data to RAID chip for checksumming and from there to the disc controllers compared to checksumming on the CPU which gives higher CPU usage but less bus load.) But this is guesswork, I don't have much experience in this field, so corrections welcome!

Update: Thanks to Russel for his article on Bus Bandwidth in response to my question.

Recently spent three days playing poker, watching movies and drinking beer (we call that military service in Switzerland.) Layer Cake: Fun, somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse^W Pulp Fiction or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Hmm. Why am I not surprised that Matthew Vaughn was also involved in the latter? I need to pay more attention to the names of directors and producers.) Also watched Meaning of Life one more time, no comment needed, I guess. Started watching Man on Fire (2004, by Tony Scott) but went to bed before the action really started, so I can't comment on it. Discussed modern (fast-paced, nervous etc.) moviemaking which reminded me that I should mention Русский ковчег (Russian Ark) as a counter-example: the whole movie is one single 90 min long steadicam shot.

I invite Wouter to Switzerland when he says that the problem with using Trains as office space is “of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...”: Our General Abonement costs ca. CHF 3000 (EUR 1800) a year and includes virtually all public transport in Switzerland, excluding only some cablecars in the mountains and similar things (and even there you sometimes get a price reduction.)

Wow! Lenovo sent us 2 shiny new Thinkpad T61. I only ordered them on July 10. Actually I ordered Z61m, and was informed end of August (!) that they're not available anymore, so re-posted the order to get the T61. So after I had issues with Dell before, Lenovo also proves less than ideal. At least the machines that we do have are working fine, so far its only getting them that's the problem.