[Kroupware] webmail and unix accounts

[Tobias Crefeld]

Art Cancro:

[Citadel]
>  1. No unix accounts required for mail users
>  2. Web mail supported
>  3. Shared folders supported
> 
> 
>  Again, I don't want to derail the current project, but I would like
>  to have Citadel considered as the long-term solution for an Exchange
> replacement.

There exist a lot of mailbased solutions and a lot of them have some 
groupware-functionality like Exchange, Suse-Emailserver (similar setup to the 
one kroupware is using), Groupwise, some of them based on databases 
others based on maildirs. Others like Teamoffice, Iteam and of course Notes 
had been originally designed as groupware with some email-funktions 
added. There are some appication-finders on the web which offer links to 
dozens of groupware-solutions most of them webbased.

At the moment there are a lot of backends available and some desktop-
clients as well but most of them are using proprietary interfaces. Most 
installations are using Notes or Exchange which could be seen as a industry-
standard but with bad documentation of how to use this interfaces on a 
network level and API only for MSWin-platform there is no way to take them 
over as a general standard. Especially MS is changing its rpc-communication 
from one day to the other  as they like. On the OpenSource side exists LDAP, 
SMTP, IMAP, etc. for mail, but there is no standard for calendaring, resource 
management, etc.

I only had a short look on your installation and basically it looks like a BBS with 
some mail-add-ons (unfortunatedly without Fidonet-gateway, bad, very 
bad... :-). Something that I missed is the possibility of using Outlook to use 
Citadel which seems to be a important argument for organizsations which 
try to migrate away from Exchange and which is part of "Kroupware-
contract". 
Another basic element of such software is something I would call 
collaborative calendaring and resource-assignment.
Maybe you could clarify how this could be managed with Citadel? 


Regards,
 Tobias.