E-GroupWare !!!!
lokesh.ahire December 25th, 2007
A Warm Welcome from Suhail Thakur …….
“The Egroupware Fable”
We had got this project of installing egroupware on one of our clients server. Something that we had never heard about, So our first task was to find out what actaully EGroupware is, this required a little bit of googling, and this is what we found :
eGroupware is a free enterprise ready groupware software for your network. It enables you to manage contacts, appointments, todos and many more for your whole business. It comes with a native web-interface which allows to access your data from any platform all over the planet. Moreover you also have the choice to access the eGroupware server with your favorite groupware client (Kontact, Evolution, Outlook) and also with your mobile or PDA via SyncML. eGroupWare is platform independent.
In short what we can say, egroupware is like a Content Management System, which allows you to manage your contacts, check your emails, manage your websites, manage your files and many other features.
After we were through what egroupware was, now was the main part where we need to know what are the prerequisites and what is the configuration reuiqred.
It was not easy, when we first started with the requirements of egrouware, we came to know after we had downloaded the egroupware installation package and we started with the egroupware installation test. And we realised that we will have to recompile apache and as well as PHP. That was ok. But still the main task was to clear up all the warning messages that the egroupware installation page would show. Even after PHP was recompiled and reconfigured we then realised that it was still not over. There were many packages that the egroupware required and which we had still not installed. you can say these were the kerberos which is related to the gcc, g++ and gcc-c++ packages and the libjpg, libpng and libfreetypedir, liblstool, libmcrypt.
Even after doing all the above tasks, the warnings were still not cleared, we were on the debugging path trying to find what went missing, and finally found that its the libmcrypt that has been installed. The thing is, libmcrypt needs to be installed with POSIX thread disabled, so again a little bit of googling and it was done and there PHP was ready to take on the egrouware.
There’s this new thing we found about PHP that was required with for the Egroupware and that is the PEAR, its a name of a fruit. But here PEAR is PHP Extension and Application Repository.
After PEAR was done, we were ready to go ahead with the egrouware and as per the steps mentioned, we entered the required details about the server and its mail mysql application and Egroupware was all setup and DONE.
If you would like to know the steps required for installation of Egroupware, you can visit our Little Blog at :
http://www.egroupware.co.nr
Thank You
Systems Team
Magnet Technologies
www.magnettechnologies.com