Interesting groupware comparison
ClarkConnect evaluated several groupware solutions for integration into version 4.0 of their product and selected the combination of Kolab and Horde.
ClarkConnect, who offer some kind of web server/gateway deployment and management system that looks similar to Plesk or Cpanel to me, have evaluated several groupware solutions to be integrated into their ClarkConnect 4.0 software. They analysed eGroupware, Open-Xchange, Zimbra, Scalix, and Kolab/Horde, and also looked at CommuniGate, Kerio, and Xchange Network.
I haven't heard of ClarkConnect before, and I usually take such comparisons with a grain of salt, but it's still interesting and of course I am happy that we won. :-) The main reasons seem to be, beside that we met their requirements:
- Maturity - Both Kolab and Horde have been developed for many years, Horde even much longer than Kolab. The components Kolab is built on, are probably even more mature, the most important being Cyrus, Postfix, and OpenLDAP. All have proven to work on very large systems and to scale well.
- Standards compliant - Both Kolab and Horde are technology wise based on open standards. To speak of Horde there are common standards like XHTML, CSS2, or DOM on the interface side, IMAP, ANSI SQL, LDAP, IMSP, or SyncML on the protocol side, and finally MIME, iCalendar, vCard etc. on the format side.
- Not reinventing - Granted, we still have a lot of code in Horde that's available somewhere else similarly, but it's one of Horde's strength that we don't bundle everything or require certain servers or backends. That's one of the reasons why Horde is so hard to install and sometimes complicated to configure, but on the other hand you can make it work with almost any existing infrastructure. We still have a lot of PHP and PEAR dependencies, but these can be installed easily and don't conflict with other software. And we don't bring our own mail server, or require MySQL like some other solutions. I'm glad that someone noticed that this is a good thing, even though it's responsible for our weakest point.
