# Introduction to moregroupware

## What is moregroupware?

To make a long story short: moregroupware is a web-based groupware application.

Some of the features that are worth being mentioned:

- Contact/address management

- Webmail

- full-featured Calendar

- ToDo management

- News

- Project management

- Some preferences for each module

- Skins based on Cascading Style Sheets

The best thing is: it's free. The software is available as free software, complete with source code.

## Why moregroupware?

Oh dear, another groupware I hear you say, and yes you are right, there are many open source web-groupwares available, so why yet another project?

The answer is, we wanted a groupware that satisfies our needs, so we decided to program our own. The software was started at Morelogs GmbH in Germany, and at first there wasn't the idea to open source it. Back then we only wanted to have our own groupware, without any commercial interests.

There were some inquiries from business partners that wanted to have it, so we decided it would be a good step to open source it, because we just didn't want to sell it with the closed source modell.

So we started of to create the infrastructure for the project, picked up a productname and waited to see what would happen. We use it on a daily basis at morelogs right now.

So why use moregroupware? We created an easy to understand framework and we didn't blindly use 3rd party modules and try to incooperate them. We wrote main modules like calendar and contacts from scratch and therefore have no code overhead because of different approaches of different projects.

And the story still continues...

## How can I try moregroupware?

We used to have a demo server on the website. This server is not available currently. But if you want to try moregroupware, and have a computer that can boot from CDD-ROM, we have a wonderful solution for you.

Thomas Bley prepared a special version of Knoppix, that comes preloaded with moregroupware. Just boot from the CD, and you have a running moregroupware server ready to play with. And there won't be any changes to your computer - just reboot without the CD, and all is back to normal!

More details can be found at the moregroupware website at http://www.moregroupware.org/knoppix.php

## Who is developing moregroupware?

moregroupware is developed by developers pread worldwide in a collaborative manner, following open source principles. We are using the services provided by sourceforge.net, therefore you can get a developer list at sourceforge.net .Or you take a look at this list on the moregroupware website.

## Who is using moregroupware?

Here some case studies will be presented, that show who uses moregroupware, and what it is used for.

### Somewhere in Australia

An australian Apple reseller uses moregroupware to manage their customer contacts. The module has been customized rather heavily, but still moregroupware is the basis...

They have around 75.000 contacts (businesses and contacts in total) in the database, and the thing is running on an Apple xServe dual processor 1GHz PowerPC machine, and "performs like a dream". That sounds like some setup, no?

### Local government, south - west part of Norway:

A calendar system like Exchange with Outlook clients was needed for an office situated at two different places. With only 15 users it would have been expensive to buy a new server and licenses to run Exchange.

In stead Moregroupware was installed. It does not need the big system resources and could happily run at the already existing Windows NT server. And it was totally free.

At the moment only the calendar part of MGW is in use.