[skwashd]

Over two decades ago I started worked on open source groupware projects. I moved on about 15 years ago. Back then it was all about building an open source alternative to MS Exchange (or Novell GroupWise). Today little has changed.

In the early days it was mostly PHP and Perl front ends for a MySQL database and various daemons. The mid 00s saw a new batch of solutions emerge such as OpenXchange, Zimbra and OpenGroupWare.org. SOGo traces its roots to OpenGroupWare.org. Google Apps, which went on to become G Suite and finally Google Workspace launched around the same time.

When looking at most of the products in this space today, including M365, Google Workspace and the various open source offerings, I don’t need much innovation in terms of features. The core product is still email, calendar, todos and notes. There have been compounding incremental improvements in these features, but haven’t been any big ground breaking changes.

Today Google and Microsoft bundles their “office” apps and “groupware” apps into a single integrated offering. I don’t see an open source product that comes close to either of them. The self hosted / on prem offerings are servicing a shrinking niche.

I keep watching this space, but I have given up expecting to see any significant changes.

[nerdponx]

The real innovation I think would be a traditional groupware application that behaves more like Notion or Atlassian or a CRM. I feel like Google started in this direction, but didn't go far enough.

Imagine if every component is tightly integrated and highly cross-linkable. Right click somebody's name in a document and get their contact card from which you can email them and find all of their public documents. Find all backlinks to a particular document. Rich global search across types of assets.

Our current technology seems so close, but the integrations are inconsistent and the UX is poor.

[baobun]

What are your thoughts on Hubzilla?

[skwashd]

It feels more like social media/sharing app than something suited to a business environment. Email, scheduling, chat and document sharing are must haves in a modern business. Hubzilla lacks all but one of these.