Migration project in south India

[bluelight]

A friendly hello to all open-exhangers,

we are a bunch of open source enthusiasts in south India in a non-profit project (www.auroville.org) of 2000 people. We are in the process of research to find a model installation to move our services (municipal services, educational and cultural services as well as administrative services) to Linux (we work on Hardy Heron). We spent some time exploring several groupware solutions and settled on Open-Exchange. We have about 50 offices to migrate. The average setup is a group between 2 and 5 people working in an office with a local network. Some of these offices are on a common network, other are separate and have DSL connections.

Our intention is to document this migration on the Open-Exchange Wiki or forum so that other organisations can benefit from it.
Now here are some conceptual questions. I ask them because my experience is that starting with the right concepts can save lots of time and problems in the migration.

A working group of 2 to 5 people and would need a common mailbox, calendar and task list as well as document sharing (with versions). How would you set such a group up in Open-Exchange? Can users have their private mail box? How complicated does that get regarding the mail relay?
We don't have a local network to connect all office but every office has it's own local network. DSL at 256 kb/s is reliably established. Our mail server is outsourced so we need to be able to relay the mail.
I would appreciate if you share your experiences with us.
The Blue Light team.

[Martin Heiland]

Hey,

this projects sound very cool, useful and i have the biggest respect for you people working on such a humanity project, regardless which groupware you use

On the conceptual and architectural side it'll be challenging to find a optimal solution either to out-source the groupware server to a datacenter or setup 50 server - i think one server for approx 5 people is a bit oversized and would lead to huge administrative complexity. If all the offices already have a DSL connection it could make more sense to manage the groupware on a central place somewhere anybody can reach it and only have to do the administration stuff once. I admit 256kb/s are not optimal for a pretty heavyweight user interface but once everything is cached at the browser, working with the groupware will be acceptable fast. Are there any concerns about outsourcing the server? I think it'll make the whole setup more maintainable. If there are severe performance problems with this bandwidth it could be possible to create a local web server for the user interface which talks to the Open-Xchange server as the backend at a datacenter, such a "GUI proxy" won't need any administration and is set up in minutes. But this would also be a little bit of maintenance overhead.

Each "working group" of 2 to 5 members can be set up as a context. Open-Xchange 6 is made for the hosting market and there you'll have many tenants (=contexts) where different users/customers work in their isolated environment on one machine so you don't have to setup a new server for a new user environment which makes it a very affordable and efficient solution. Inside a context you have users that can do all the sharing stuff with each other and can have private mailboxes as well as shared mailboxes (if the mailserver supports it). Configuring mail relay should not be that hard and has already been done many times which such kind of software. It could be possible that we don't need mail-relay because the mailserver can be connected to the Open-Xchange server directly without mailrouting in between.

Greetings

[Daniel Halbe]

Hi,

there are different ways to realize this.

If we can make a success story together for the indian market I can bring you in contact with some professionals (perhaps even in india) which can help you for no or for little money

Simply send me a private message or an email to daniel.halbe[AT]open-xchange.com


Have a nice weekend,

Daniel