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[so_solid_moo]

Welcome visitors from my blog. As I said there, I'm hoping to kick off various discussions every couple of weeks - so if this stirs the pot, we'll do it again

Where do you use Bongo, and where do you want to use Bongo?

I'll start with my story. I got involved with Hula originally because I saw it partly as something that the company I work for could offer, but also because I saw it as a fun project to potentially hack on. In the end, I didn't contribute a huge amount - it was kinda difficult - but that changed with Bongo.

My needs/wants from Bongo have changed since then too (it was three years ago.. over...). Right now, I use Bongo to handle part of my private mail at home. It works great (except for the IMAP bug we have with large amounts of outstanding e-mail, which I'm working on!).

I would love to use Bongo in our company. Ideally, it would be serving up CalDav calendars to Thunderbird users and synchronising it with SugarCRM. The first bit works right now, the second bit is a pipe dream, but you never know - it's something we really need, so I may end up hacking on that sooner.

What about the rest of you? Do you use Bongo right now? Where do you want to use Bongo in the future, and what would your Bongo be doing?

[nod]

Well i'm not using bongo right now, but i'm really interested in it. For personal use (still a student…) like let it become my personal agenda, reliable, clean, easy.

I'd like to manage my emails (yeah, obviously…) on my own and the calendar would be the main reason i'd use it, being able to check it anywhere and make it (things i choose to display) available for others to see, they'll know if i'm available or not.

And why not let them add meetings or tasks (mums'd like that i bet) on my calendar and let me validate it, or not.

I'll try bongo very soon

[patoh]

I do not currently use bongo due to the inability to save preferences as a user with 0.3.1 and the svn version.

But I would love to use bongo for a clean email/calendering solution.

Some features that I would love in the future would be the ability to hook both email and calendering up to an email client (IMAP/WebDAV?) as not all users in my house enjoy web based things

[tavitar]

We also not using bongo right now (except for testing). We've been using Novell's Netmail for the past 8+ years for our ~ 20,000 client. Since the time it was open sourced to Hula, disappeared and reappeared as Bongo, we've been following the progress quite closely. Over the years there's been a growing demand for calendaring in our organization which looks to be promising in Bongo.

We're hoping to implement a system on open standards using IMAP and CalDav. While a combo of postfix, roundcube, davical + lightning (or similar) may do the trick, it isn't the most integrated solution. It also doesn't give us a CalDav web client.

So we're really looking forward to trialling a production ready Bongo. Until then I'll keep fighting off requests for Exchange and Groupwise.

Keep up the awesome work

[Jayschwa]

I just discovered Bongo about half-an-hour ago. It looks promising and I'll probably tinker with it this weekend. Since I haven't actually used it yet, I'll just explain what I'm after, in general.

I would like to host my own webmail on a server at home. Since I am likely to be swapping out the server machine at points in time, it would be great if the webmail is easy to install, has sane defaults, and is easy to backup and restore.

To give an example, I am currently running a server (old family computer) that is hosting subversion and trac for my college senior design group. Trac automatically installs with some python utility called easy_install. A project is automatically created and has everything you need to get started. Backups are really easy - all you have to do is make a hot copy of the project folder (with a trac-admin command). Restoring is simply a matter of replacing that copied project folder. I believe Trac uses its own sqlite database in the project folder, so no database mucking is required, which is nice.

I look forward to checking this thing out and possibly contributing!

[tijs]

i run a small software company with a partner. we sell a web app for recruitment agencies that among other things has a few 'online office' functionalities like calendaring and mailing lists. since most of our clients are on a mac they tend to use the ical, mail.app, addressbook combi and we are thinking of having our next software version support that by using something like bongo on the backend to support integrated workgroup like functionality while integrating some of the mailing functionality with our own web app. the bongo web interfaces wold still be available but only as a backup for when they are on the road.

i find the current version slightly daunting to setup and test still but i intend to do that soon enough. other alternatives we are looking at are the new kerio 6.5, zimbra enterprise or a component based setup (postfix, dovecot, openldap, etc.) but these either add a lot of extra costs per user or a lot of extra complexity. stuff i woud like to avoid

something like "$ yum install bongo" and a webmin like admin interface would help me out a lot i guess.

[ken]

At home.  I kind of gave up on local-client email apps a couple years ago, both since I always wanted to access my email from anywhere, and since Evolution kept not-improving (and nothing else looked much better).

I signed up for GMail as soon as I found out about it, and I've been using that.  Unfortunately, it's also failed to improve (and actually gotten worse in some areas).

Plus, I really just want to have control over my own email.

Features I would use (or not):
- The calendar isn't important to me, because I virtually never use calendars.
- If it could integrate with a Jabber server easily, that would be pretty cool (I'd like to get off GTalk, too).
- Encryption would be a killer feature; if there was an easy way to set up GPG+HTTPS (perhaps with a special key?), that would be awesome.
- Notes!  80% of the time, I use GMail to just jot down notes.  It's a little annoying to have to fill up my Drafts with these, with a To: line (required to be a valid email address on GMail!).  A dedicated "Notes" feature would be awesome.
- Localization is always nice to have, especially when I'm learning a new language (.jp)

Come to think of it, my startup was looking at email systems last year when we started.  We looked around very briefly, and then said "screw it, we'll just forward everything to our GMail accounts".

FWIW, we also run Trac internally, so that's about the level of maturity we were looking for: "one guy who's never installed it before should be able to install and configure it completely (including LDAP and backups) in an afternoon" (and then never think about it ever again).

(Maybe Bongo is there now, but I've never used it before, while I've used Trac many times.)

cheers,

[nod]

GPG support would be indeed great.

[cornbread]

I am currently using zimbra and I liked it because of how easy it is to set up domains and users in linux. I've been playing with postfix and it just seems so cumbersome to set up only to use squirrelmail

I am looking for a good web client that is fast (zimbra is pretty slow sometimes) that looks nice and is feature filled.

-Nice calendar support (email/text reminders)
-task reminders (text alerts or email alerts to cell phone)
-contact/customer database
-connectable with evolution (calendar support and other features not just imap)
-share files (zimbra briefcase)
-EASY BACKUP'S (preferably automatic) this is one thing i don't like about zimbra you have to buy 25 user licenses to get good backups.

I think those are pretty important things and we will definately support bongo if it continues to head in the right direction.

Keep up the great work!!!

[MarS]

I want to have a good look at Bongo, it looks quite interesting. I just hope you will provide a FreeBSD package oder even provide a port (http://www.freebsd.org/ports/).

I am also currently using Zimbra and am not satisfied with its CalDAV/iCal support. It also has some annoying bugs. But the interface of the whole webclient is great. Maybe it is just my lack of experience, but I've never seen a better groupware calendar UI in a webclient. It is very easy to create new event or move it around (just like in iCal).

You should have a good look at it: http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php