Status of Kolab - possible production usage?

[Hermann Himmelbauer]

Hi,
I'm currently looking for a Linux-based groupware for me and my clients. After 
searching a lot (and not wanting to use Exchange), I came across Kolab, which 
looks very promising to me, as it uses technologies, which I like and which I 
currently use in various installations (postfix, cyrus, spamassassin, 
clamav...).

In specific, I am looking for the following:

- Decent webclient (horde)
- Groupware functionality
- MS Outlook integration 
- KDE (Kontact) integration
- Syncing with mobile phones (SyncML)

So I downloaded the latest Kolab version (2.2.2) and installed it on my Debian 
5.0 server. On my client, I currently use KDE-3.5.9 (distributed with suSE 
11.0). The server install was very smooth, user creation too.

But the client install is a mess - tried it with kolabwizard first, but 
Kontact (kmail) keeps crashing, found out that this had to do with Sieve, 
which I now disabled. Then I tried to transfer some of my contacts from my 
local to the kolab resources via cut & paste -> kaddressbook crashed.

Ok, I then tried to look at Horde to see, if the transfer actually worked, but 
there are no contacts, no calendar entries. However, when I enter a calendar 
entry directly in Horde, it's invisible in Horde, but visible in Kontact. For 
the addresses, I'm unsure if they are acutally synced to the server, as they 
are, too, invisible on Horde. (But I can see them in the IMAP folders).

Next I tried syncing my SonyEricsson K750i with Horde, which also failed due 
to some unknown reason - I tried that before with funambol, which did work, 
but there seems to be no interface between Kolab/Horde <-> funambol.

After that many struggles, I'm asking myself if Kolab is ready for production 
use or if I should give it some time to stabilize and switch to something 
else in the meantime.

What are your experiences? Perhaps I had bad luck? Am I better off with the 
latest KDE release instead of 3.5.9?

Best Regards,
Hermann

-- 
hermann at qwer.tk
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