There seems to be some interesting groupware products out there that are trying to remove Microsoft's Exchange server from the King of the Hill position it is on right now. Unfortunately,  most of the supposedly open source solutions are really closed source solutions with little teasers that are open source.

They are sort of like, we'll let you have the free cd player, radio, but you have to pay for the car. Like, give me the car without the cd player and I can put in my own!!!

Fortunately, there are a few truly open groupware products out there, and I've just come across a few that might be interesting to investigate further:

There are a number of different considerations for submerging your group into a Groupware solution, one being the maintainability of the system and the application of existing knowledge. Some of the solutions, especially the half-open source solutions, attempt to bring together a best of breed solution. In that way, you get a great, well tested base of components (mail server, calendar server, firewall, etc) that is integrated by the groupware team.

The other path, is to create everything yourself and hopefully have a better integration story (such as is with Microsoft Exchange.)

Citadel.org

Citadel is a complete and feature-rich open source groupware platform.

• Email, calendaring/scheduling, address books

• Bulletin boards, mailing list server, instant messaging

• Multiple domain support

• An intuitive, attractive <ACRONYM>AJAX</ACRONYM>-style web interface

Users love Citadel because it’s software that helps them work, play, stay in touch... without calling attention to itself. System administrators love Citadel because it installs in minutes without the need to manually integrate all the different components together.The key to Citadel’s versatility is its unique architecture. A Citadel system is made up of containers called “rooms.” A room may be used as an email folder, a discussion forum, a real-time chat, a mailing list, a calendar, an address book, an <ACRONYM>RSS</ACRONYM> sink ... sometimes a combination of any of the above, and certainly any other uses which could be added in the future. Furthermore, you can replicate rooms between multiple Citadel nodes, allowing you to set up a federated, distributed messaging environment.With that in mind, Citadel excels at applications such as:

• E-mail and groupware (shared calendaring, etc.)

• Bulletin Board System (BBS)

• Online discussion forums / chat rooms

The Citadel system is extremely versatile. It provides numerous front ends to present to users, such as a text-based interface, an <ACRONYM>AJAX</ACRONYM>-style web interface, and many popular PIM clients using <ACRONYM>SMTP</ACRONYM>/<ACRONYM>POP</ACRONYM>/<ACRONYM>IMAP</ACRONYM>. All of these can be used simultaneously.It’s also extremely scalable. Not only can a well-equipped Citadel server support a large number of concurrent users, but you can also build a distributed network of Citadel nodes that share rooms and their content.

To create, as a community, the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms, and to provide access to all functionality and data through open XML-based interfaces and APIs.

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.
eGroupWare is a groupware server. It comes with a native web-interface which allowes 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 international. At the time, it supports more than 25 languages including rtl support.
eGroupWare is platform independent. The server runs on Linux, Mac, Windows and many more other operating systems. On the client side, all you need is a internetbrowser such as Firefox, Konqueror, Internet Explorer and many more.

phpGroupWare

phpGroupWare is a fully featured, web based messaging, collaboration and enterprise management platform.

phpGroupWare comes with over 50 applications that can be mixed and matched according to your needs. Some of the most powerful features we offer include:

• Contacts management
• Email
• Shared calendar
• Web content and document management and sharing
• Project management
• Issues tracking

All this is freely downloadable.

phpGroupWare is free/open source software - which means the software can be modified to suit your specific needs.

At the core of phpGroupWare is our advanced Application Programming Interface (API) which allows you to build and deploy your own web based applications quickly and easily. Our API easily supports multiple database backends, permissions and access controls, user interface generation and multiple languages.

phpGroupWare is flexible and scalable. It is suitable for small groups of people and large organisations. phpGroupWare is international - we currently support over 20 languages. Around the world tens of thousands of people use phpGroupWare every day.

phpGroupWare is a GNU Package.

The key issues for me at the moment is that I do not want to waste the time trying to implement a test solution (with no real customers except for myself) and to find out after wasted (invested) hours that there are missing parts that need to be paid for. After all, I can get away with most of my personal groupware stuff by either talking to someone live, using the telephone, or just using existing online communication tools.