In a follow-up to my comparison Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu Edgy as desktop environments, I went on to test them with both a server task. How easy would it be set them up as Egroupware servers?

As will quickly become clear, Ubuntu was the clear winner at making installing Egroupware a fast and pleasant experience.

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.

After trying Kolab and Kontact as a groupware solution, I decided to see if I could come up with a simpler way to share contacts and calendars involving Thunderbird.

I had hoped that simply giving several users read/write access to the same address book would work. According to this bug report, it doesn't.

I was then lead to discover SyncKolab, along with the Calendar extension for Thunderbird.

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.