bitfusion

Groupware & Collaboration Plattforms

Some month ago I’ve evaluated a few collaboration systems for the organization Austrian Service Abroad with the aim to improve organization and communication. Especially to get rid of Email as the only way for information exchange and for project-based tasks. You have to consider that the focus was not project management in the first place but some basic features needed were:

• Integrated Email Management
  
• Contact Management
• Forum
• Simple Documentmanagement
• Linklists or uncategorized information

Group Office

+ Forum extension
+ Big community in Austria and Japan
+ Calendar provides iCal support
+ friendly, clear user interface
+ Projectmanagement feature
+ Notes
+ German language support
+ Common folder to share data between users

phpGroupWare

+ Forum
+ Huuuge feature & extension base
+ Extensive projectmanagement
+ Knowledgebase (for e.g. glossary)
- Insufficient file management, no filetypes - No WYSIWYG editor (!)
- Quite confusing UI (e.g. messenger) and partly ineffectual implemented

eGroupWare (Fork of phpGroupWare)

- No forum
- Very project management aligned
- No WYSIWYG editor and existing editor lacks of functionality

PHProjekt

+ Incredible feature set (Even chat via web browser)
- Nerdy UI with endless long forms is definitely not very sexy
- Cross browser issues: Context menu doesn’t work correctly in Firefox
- Filemanagement very cumbersome

dotproject

+ iCal export
+ Files can be attached to tasks
+ Outboard, for managing
+ Quite simple UI (colours could be improved)
- No Email management. Emails have to be send via an external client
- File creation via upload only

phpCollap

- No live demo found
- Not modular (at the moment)
- Early project state

moreGroupWare

+ “Outlook like” Email management
+ Problems on Mac
+ Early release (0.7.4)
- Login problems with some browsers (FF 2/Mac)
- No WYSIWYG Editor, plain text files only

In the end the big code & user base of Group Office and the fact that it met all our requirements from the beginning made a clear winner. Please note: that the listed projects may have been updated in the meantime and features may have changed.

Additional Sources:
List of collaborative software (Wikipedia)