Scalable OpenGroupware.org

This article is a follow-up to “Linux Groupware Roundup”, published in Linux Journal in July 2005. As you might know, a few things have changed since 2005:

The open-source collaboration servers mentioned in the 2005 article have all survived the competition:

This article focuses on Scalable OpenGroupware.org (SOGo), a complete open-source groupware that integrates all requirements one would expect from a collaboration suite: accessibility, consistent interfaces, scalability and stability.

Based on OpenGroupware.org, a project with more than ten years of maturity, Scalable OpenGroupware.org provides a complete groupware solution oriented toward scalability instead of depth in functionality. SOGo offers all standard groupware features, including the following:

It also stores calendar information using the iCalendar standard and contact information using the vCard format. This avoids information loss when exchanging over protocols supported by SOGo, such as CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV.

In development since 2004, the project has greatly improved during the past few months. Inverse, developers on the project, contributed many improvements, such as CalDAV, CardDAV and ACL support. Furthermore, it re-created SOGo's Web interface so that it matches the look and feel of Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning (or its standalone equivalent, Sunbird). The interface now also makes use of Ajax. Although CalDAV and IMAP take care of the calendaring and e-mail integration of the Mozilla suite with SOGo, address books also needed to be synchronized. Inverse created a plugin for Thunderbird named SOGo Connector that adds this functionality among others.

These contributions allow SOGo to provide Web and native interfaces sharing the same look and feel, features and data—a considerable advantage and uncommon characteristic compared with other FOSS groupware solutions.

SOGo depends on a few core components, such as Apache, PostgreSQL, an LDAP server and an IMAP server (preferably Cyrus IMAP Server, Dovecot or Courier) that uses the LDAP server as the authentication back end. You need to install those (or reuse existing installations) and get them running properly before continuing with the SOGo installation instructions. SOGo supports other database back ends, but for this article, we assume the use of PostgreSQL and that all components, including the LDAP server, are installed on the same server. Furthermore, SOGo depends on the following components:

Start with obtaining GNUstep make and base. If you're using Debian, you can install both components with apt-get:

% apt-get install gnustep-make libgnustep-base1.13 
 ↪libgnustep-base-dev

Then, retrieve the SOPE and SOGo's sources from the official Subversion server:

% svn co http://svn.opengroupware.org/SOPE/trunk/ SOPE-trunk
% svn co http://svn.opengroupware.org/SOGo/inverse/trunk/ SOGo-trunk

SOPE needs to be patched so that it works well with SOGo. Once you have pulled SOPE from the trunk successfully, apply the SOPE patch included with SOGo:

% cd SOPE-trunk
% patch -p0 < ../SOGo-trunk/SOPE/sope-patchset-*.diff

Prior to compiling SOPE and SOGo, make sure to source the GNUstep.sh script that comes with GNUstep make. This will define some environment variables used by GNUstep make when building the packages. When using the Debian packages, this script is located in /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh. Once sourced, compile and install SOPE, as follows:

% ./configure --with-gnustep --enable-strip --disable-debug
% make && make install

And, finally, compile and install SOGo, its Web templates and resources:

% cd ../SOGo-trunk
% ./configure --with-gnustep --enable-strip --disable-debug
% make && make install
% cp -a UI/WebServerResources UI/Templates $GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT/
↪Library/SOGo-0.9/