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Originally Posted by jrobb Thank you for the note. We are still working through the details of the Zimbra network launch. We have been focusing on getting the Beta out and trying to do our best to listen and respond to the community before we launch the Network. You should expect to hear more from us soon on this topic.
As for document management integration with Alfresco or others, we are definitely looking at all the options. Clearly, we have leveraged and integrated mang other open source projects like MySQL and Postfix and our plan is to continue to do the same as we look at our roadmap.
Thank you for the lead on a potential good partner. |
Actually, that was my lead
. However, I would like to back Gert's thoughts, what we really don't need is another set of disconnected, half done (feature wise) products (OpenXchane has what Zimbra has plus Project management, but ugly and cumberstone to setup, Sugar has what Zimbra has and OX has but without good PM and DM on not so fair license and on PHP etc, etc) . Alfresco is not just DMS (although people working on it are turbo turbo experts in DM, see their link with Documentum), alfresco is much more wider and nicely architectured content management system (thingy that could partly eliminate Gert's digital divide). When I (and Gert as far I can see) think about collaboration software for enterprises (SMB), I envision much wider scope than simple PIM/CIM (mail-contacts-calendar), we need CRM, telephony integration, Project Management, DM, ERP bits (human resources, asset management, general ledger) etc. Those thing all interconnect VERY much, and are nowdays done in separate "islands". Speaking of free solutions (and even commercial ones), it is huge undertaking, so there aren't many (or any, actually) free solutions with all needed functionality around. Why can't I see all channels of comunication (chats, phone talks/transcripts, mails, faxes) with my contact? Enterprise wide? All reports, charts, statistics of his spending/buying habits? What about my employees? Tasks I've given to them? Their CV's? Their contacts? Productivity? Payroles? Vacations? Transfering of tasks when on vacation? What about Items/goods/services my firm offers? History of purchases? Best buyers? Ad hoc campaigns? Results of campaigns? What about knowledge base? What if my marketing manager need different perspective on the same set of data than my programmer or accountant? If I'm doing services, how do I know how many times people called? How do they know in what stage exactly is their computer/paper/request? Can I SMS them when it is done? Or send a message? Or mail? Or call? Automatically?
It is a huge undertaking, but with selected, funded teams each working on they own field of expertise, but just with bigger picture in mind, something in the range of Domino/Lotus 7 but integrated with telephony and ERP/CRM could be done with all of OSS technology and knowledge and manpower around. Something like this:
Zimbra does classical PIM/CIM (email, contacts, calendar, chat, integration with peripherals like PDA's, phones or other PIM/CIM clients/servers)
Alfresco does content management (classical DM with bussines templates, integration with office suites like MSOffice and especially OpenOffice, storing and retreiving more general content like mail entries, calendar entries, reports, invoices, telephone calls etc, etc). Btw, Alfresco will be huge, they have huge knowledge and big contacts in enterprises, and they really know what they are doing.
Our team (
www.rest-art.hr, sorry site is still not internationalized) makes HR, CRM, General Ledger, basically on top of alfresco and Zimbra, paid project is in planning phase (based on OMG, HR-XML, ebXML, OfBiz, with Inventory management comming in next phase, late 2006)
Asterisk does VoIP (part of our team is working with asterisk) and POTS telephony
JBOSS or Liferay gives server/portal environment (there is of course, much more of underlaying technology, but I'm a freak for portal interfaces
. )
Pentaho does business intelligence (another of my favorite projects currently in incubator/alpha phase but with great future, basically using similar or same technology and with similar or same license, with great great people on board).
We loosely couple the damn thing around ESB and common workflow(s), iron out UI differences and approaches a little, package nicely, and let it in the wild to grow.
Each of our teams could offer a standalone products, but what would be extremely interesting is if we could make those standalone products interoperatible, making one huge enterprise platform to build upon. It is a huge undertaking, of course, but it needs just a great coordination of parties involved and planing on much wider scope, however, final result could be OSS product that looks like and in much aspect surpasses commercial business/productivity application suites like Domino/Lotus (I like their new offering veeeery much), stepping deep in the territory of giants like SAP, Oracle and such, with free and flexible OSS offering.
Filip Selendic
Rest Art, CTO