[horde] Success Story With Horde!

[Taylor Dondich]

I just wanted to write out a big thank you to the development team 
behind Horde and the modules.  I've got a bit of praise to sing and I'd 
like to all tell you my story.

A Real Estate firm in town has three locations.  They were using a 
standard pop3 mail service and would download it into Outlook 2000.  The 
owner came to me and wanted to know if there was a better solution where 
they can begin sharing data together and having their mail follow them 
around (they had roaming computers).  I quickly gave them a firm yes and 
without really knowing, didn't have a solution that I could give them. 
At the time, I was running Qmail with Courier-Imap, with SquirrelMail as 
the web-end.  After setting their mail services up and showing the 
owner(s) the system, they really didn't agree with it.  It couldn't 
integrate into Outlook, the webmail interface was flimsy at best and 
SquirrelMail's calendaring and addressbook plug-ins just were not robust 
enough.

With despair, I took my Thanksgiving holiday vacation and sat down to 
research other solutions.  One of the first was IMP and I researched the 
usability and the demo site available at www.horde.org.  My excitement 
began and I saw the immediate flexability of this system.  In only two 
days, I had a complete working system for the client and I believed it 
met all their needs (perhaps not one or two, but I'll get into that 
later).  After visiting the client and having a huge meeting showing the 
usage of the system, everyone seemed very happy with the result.  As I 
left the client site, I noticed that not one copy of Outlook was 
running.  Everyone was using the web mail solution powered by Horde.

I think it's only reasonable to give some detail to the site's 
configuration so if anyone sees another way to better it or perhaps try 
something different, they can let me know.

As for the server side, I have a Dell PowerEdge 500SC dedicated to their 
mail.  It's running QMail as the MTA and Courier-IMAP to provide mail 
folder and mail agent services.

On the Horde Side, I am running all CVS code in a production environment 
and so far, not too many problems.  The modules I'm currently running 
are: Horde Framework/IMP/Turba/Kronolith/Mneo/Gollem/Nag.  All are CVS 
code.  For User authentication, I'm using IMP's imap authentication. 
This kind of limits the flexability of setting permissions for the VFS 
in Gollum, I'm looking for a way to go around that.  Shared Addressbooks 
are done via setting up two mysql driver driven addressbooks, one being 
public for the global addressbook.

My only question is, is it possible to instead of being unable to create 
users because of IMP's authentication, but create users automatically 
upon login with IMP, the only restriction being you can't change the 
password.  That way you can continue to setup groups and assign 
permissions to gollum and such.

Also, I have been unable to get any functionality of shared calendaring, 
anyone's advice would be useful.  Also, is there soon to be a feature of 
assigning tasks to other people?

One last thing that they have requested.  They have wanted to look into 
the functionality of synching with their Palm'.  Is this in any sort of 
development, and if not, can I assist in anyway furthering the project? 
I'd love to get involved and I am a decent PHP developer.

Thanks to you developers!

Taylor Dondich