[GRLUG] Coils [Was: groupware recommendation]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 08:54 -0400, John-Thomas Richards wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 07:02:13PM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 16:57 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> > > Where I work, the guy who has control over our servers is extremely
> > > paranoid of external housing of data. (No, that's not going to change;
> > > don't let that debate sidetrack this thread.) We haven't touched
> > > external dedicated managed-hardware servers or VPS, much less managed
> > > applications. Colo is the closest we've gotten.
> > > I'd be very interested to know about groupware recommendations that
> > > can be managed in-house.
> > Well, I'm developing OpenGroupware Coils.  Evolution is the first client
> > I test with.  But it isn't a released product/project, yet.
> > It is a port of the Objective-C OpenGroupware server which is a PITA to
> > get installed on modern distributions [GNUStep being a mess].
> So the difference between the two is Objective-C versus Python?

No, or at least I'm not certain what that means.  Coils is a back-ward
compatible re-implementation; it can run dual-stack [as we do] with
Coils and OpenGroupware legacy [Objective-C version] running at the same
time.  In many ways the architecture is the same, but Coils is more
ambitious.    That is just useful for someone who already has tons of
data in OGo, until Coils reaches 100% reimplementation.

Extending functionality in Objective-C was too painful, which really
brought about the creation of Coils.  IMHO: If groupware [like CRM]
isn't integrated into your organization's other components [most notably
the ERP] it will always be 'that-other-thing' and users will just treat
it like my-calendar, etc... and you won't reach the full potential of
what IT can do

Coils, for example, 
(a) makes plugins and extending easy.  For example there is a simple
twitter plugin so if you getObjectById to get a contact from the server
it will automatically include that contacts twitter feed (if that
information is available).  Another example is providing a snapshot of
sales-statistics when an Enterprise is requested;  so you just-have that
data rather than having to coding getting into it here-and-there. (and
the server can cache the data so it doesn't get looked-up over and
over).
(b) provides a process scheduler and workflow engine [which notably can
place items on a user's to-do list.  This allows it to be used as a
component to push data back and forth between systems and applications.
(c) more sophisticated ACLs on objects [it supports Allow+Deny ACLs,
whereas legacy only implements Allow].

Also the [I think] the CalDAV support, etc... is better.


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