Home office setup advice

[philled]

I'm trailing Open-Xchange to use in our home office. Up until now we have used Dovecot imap so that we can access our email no matter which PC we're using. We have multiple email addresses and the emails are brought down to Dovecot Maildir folders by a combination of fetchmail, procmail and Dovecot deliver. All the email is delivered to a SINGLE account but into different Maildir folders depending on certain rules such as email address. So we can all see each other's email and we like it that way.

The main problem with this is that there's no common address book or calendar so that's why I thought I'd give OX a go.

I've got it installed and need some advice on how to set things up. We'd like to keep being able to see each other's email. However, I am worried that when we start sync'ing our mobiles to Outlook we're going to end up with each other's contacts and appointments all mixed together which will be a schemozzle. So what would be a good setup to allow us to see each other's emails, but not have our calendars and appointments all muddled up? (Having said that it would be good to be able to somehow view each other's calendars and appointments if possible - just not have them all muddled up together!)

[Martin Heiland]

Hi,

most modern IMAP servers support ACL which allow to share single or multiple IMAP folders to other users. Open-Xchange is capable to manage such ACL trough the web interface. In my opinion it would be the best solution to create separate E-Mail accounts and share folders you want to publish to other users. This way you get separate E-Mail addresses, personal and shared IMAP folders and don't have to worry about any client messing up something.
Generally Open-Xchange is not an E-Mail server, we care about PIM, documents etc. so if you want to synchronize E-Mail with an external client like your mobile or Outlook, you always use the native IMAP connection to your mailbox, PIM data is transfered on another connection. If you create separate OX user accounts for every user, there is no way that appointments and contacts can get messed up with other users.