When I last looked at Kolab as a groupware server, I came away feeling it was not a good fit, in part because the storage model didn't make sense to me.

After further consideration, I've come around. Storing all the data in an IMAP server actually makes a lot of sense. I took the liberty of starting a page on the Kolab wiki detailing why.

Kolab can quite readily share all kinds of groupware resources, including calendars and contacts, through shared IMAP folders. It's not necessary to involve an LDAP server for this, nor is it even necessary for users to use this set of IMAP folders for their e-mail, if simple a sharing scheme is sufficient.

In summary, I discovered the Kolab can scale down as well as up, and it was easy to set up this way. It just took a little patience to read the documentation and understand the design.

In the process, I've also become very impressed with Kontact as a groupware client. Not only does it work well with Kolab, it appears to work well with several other groupware servers.

Several of these other groupware projects put a focus on providing a web-based interface to all the data. I already have favorable first impressions all the options that I looked at.

As a professional web-database programmer, exploring these options further appeals to me because it may mean I have a greater ability to understand and modify the systems myself if I chose to.

Apparently my adventure exploring groupware isn't over yet!

One thing has become clear: there are fewer and fewer reasons to chose Exchange and Outlook as a solution, as alternatives exist that are lower cost, have the features and compatibility and are based on open source and open standards.