Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek) [LWN.net]

Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

Posted Oct 27, 2005 16:02 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813)
In reply to: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek) by rqosa
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

PDA synchronization, native cross platform clients, and shared scheduling are key requirements not met by the current crop of libre/open source groupware solutions. If there is a solution that meets all of the above, please share. I have hope that Chandler, Hula, Sunbird, and CalDAV will eventually meet the needs. For now the closed source solutions appear to have the goods.

Novell still pushes their closed source products, software licenses, as their primary means of doing business rather than a customer support model. Want groupware? Buy Groupwise. Want directory services? Buy NDS. Want a file server? Buy Netware and it's closed source clients. Want support? Pay for that seperately. I will be steering our cash strapped college towards customer driven FLOSS solutions wherever possible, this means away from Novell at the current time. Welcome to the FLOSS community Novell, innovate or die.

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Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

Posted Oct 27, 2005 21:51 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

Judging by the Kolab2 Architecture Draft, it looks to me like all of those things are supported. This part would seem to cover "shared scheduling":

1.4. Calendar Entries

…

Users can schedule group events and invite other users. An existing group event can be modified by the user who originally created it. Examples for group events are:
Group meetings

Conferences
Group events are saved like private calendar entries on the Kolab server and differ only by their attributes and access permissions.

This part would seem to cover "PDA synchronization":

1.9. Palm PDA Synchronization

The contacts, calendar events, notes, and task lists can be synchronized with a personal digital assistant (PDA) bidirectionally. The HotSync protocol is used and guarantees compatibility to a wide range of PDA devices. The reference platform is a 3Com Palm V running Palm OS v3.1.

And as for clients, there are several of them, including ones for Windows.