OpenGroupware Introduction

OpenGroupware

OpenGroupware is a robust enterprise-ready extensible collaboration platform. Unlike many other such products, most being sold under the term “groupware”, OpenGroupware is not a black box. OpenGroupware emphasizes extensibility and integration via open standards with a strong recognition that your data belongs to you. The goal of OpenGroupware is to integrate with as many groupware clients and development environments across as many platforms as possible.

OpenGroupware is not merely a set of applications such as calendering, projects, and address book. OpenGroupware is a true groupware collaboration platform providing access to your data through various protocols and several different APIs. Through the use of standard techniques like WebDAV and XML-RPC developers do not need special skills or proprietary SDKs in order to extend their applications to integrate with OpenGroupware.

However, from the perspective solely of the bundled applications OpenGroupware is also a clear leader in the amount of functionality provided out-of-the-box.

History

OpenGroupware is built upon source code released by SKYRIX Software AG1 on July 10th of 2003. Management of the project was handled primarily by SKYRIX but there were also contributors from all over the world. The SKYRIX groupware product was itself based on a product named “LSOffice” originally developed by MDLink GmbH2 starting in 1994. This makes the OpenGroupware code base one of the oldest and most well tested collaboration and groupware platforms available for open platforms.

OpenGroupware is still available as a commercial product from SKYRIX, sold as “SKYRIX5”. This commercial product adds some additional features not present in the Open Source version of OpenGroupware such as load balancing across multiple servers and support for the Oracle and Sybase RDBMS.

The development of OpenGroupware from SKYRIX stalled at about 2008. In 2011, with OpenGroupware 5.5, the development is continued as a SourceForge project.

License

Most components of OpenGroupware are open source covered under either the GPL1 or LGPL2 licenses; some core components are covered by a BSD style license.
* GNUstep make, database libraries, and other GNUstep components is covered by the LGPL license.
* libxml2, a common library, is used by OpenGroupware components for XML processing. This library is under the X11/MIT license.
* The OpenLDAP libraries used for LDAP interoperability are under a BSD license.