I've helping a friend evaluate open source alternatives for small business desktops. His primary feature requirement is shared contacts and calendaring for a staff of seven professionals.

Kolab looked attractive because it's a groupware solution made to integrate with Kontact, the personal information management suite installed by default on Mandriva Linux.

Kolab is free and easy to install.(A kolab package is provided by Mandriva).

Kolab met and far exceeded the functionality I was looking for. It offered a turnkey solution including complete e-mail management and the ability to scale to hundreds of users across several domains.

It is itself built from many standard open source technologies including Apache, PHP, Perl, IMAP and LDAP. The names may not be familiar but the value behind the design is sensible. By re-using standard compontents, kolab plays to the existings skill sets of those who manage it. This makes it easier to customize and extend if necessary.

On the desktop, it was easy to set up Kontact clients to integrate with the Kolab server. From the start screen of the program there was a link to follow which lead me to through a wizard to complete the process.

Yet, for these benefits, Kolab didn't feel like a good fit. While Kolab was easy to install, it actually installed 120(!) new packages to complete the process, and starting about eight new to run continuously. While building in everything that would be needed for a large deployment, it felt like too big a hammer for the simpler task at a hand.

For a specific example, Kolab accomplishes a shared calendar through a concept called a "shared folder". First I had to discover this, since I don't usually think of a calendar as a folder. This folder is actually an e-mail folder that the calendar program pays attention to, but the e-mail program basically ignores. That seems like an odd solution to me.

My first impression of contact sharing with equally cumbersome. I was looking for a solution which each member should share contacts freely with others. Kolab appeared to only share contacts that were managed through it's own interace. To add a new contact, it seems users would have to use Kolab's web-based interface rather than a standard desktop addressbook person. Again, I could see how this could work well for sharing a central corporate directory, but wasn't what I had in mind for a small business solution.

Other alternatives for small business calendar and contact sharing

At Summersault, we have a simple way related:to share digital calendars among a team of five, including Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Simply, we use different desktop software, but they share two features: First, they export the standard ICal format. Second, they allow subscribing to multiple remote calendars, so we can all subscribe to the other calendars without the need for a central server.

I plan to explore an option more along these lines for my next project.

I'm hoping to find an equally simple solution for contact sharing.

Two approaches seem promising to consider: Evolution is a desktop PIM suite that has the ability to allow users to share contacts be providing everyone write access to shared LDAP server.

Thunderbird is the mail program the team is already using, and it would be nice to keep using it if possible. If LDAP write access could be added to Thunderbird, it could be the ideal solution here.