http://www.zimbra.com/

This has resulted in an interesting “moment” on the term “Open”. One of the facets of Open must, at least in some context, be “open platform” – the ability to run on different platforms….

On visiting the OpenGroupware.org site, I learn that they don’t actually have binaries for Windows…. instead here’s what they say..

The project currently does not provide prebuild binaries for Windows. There are basically three ways to attempt to run OGo on Windows: port to Cygwin, run with GNUstep for Windows and run in VMware. Only the last option is well tested and works fluently.

So only the VMware option is tested. Let’s look specifically at that…

This option runs rock solid, fast and is well tested for years. Just install one of the Linux distributions (eg Debian) inside VMware running on Windows. The VMware approach is very similiar to the approach used by Java based solutions (run a virtual machine, in this case Intel ix86). The advantage is that VMware is much faster than a Java virtual machine given that the instruction set matches (both client and server use the ix86 instruction set).
And: VMware is now available for free!

Yes… OK, that is undoubtedly a way around the fact that the software doesn’t run on Windows… but it’s not a work-around I’m willing to engage with right now.

This stuff is NEVER going to take off unless it can be perceived as better than anything that you can get on windows today…. which means running on Windows.

Argh.

I’ve been using Thunderbird to connect (via Pop3) to exchange. Of course this hasn’t given me calendar – so I’ve been using Google Calendars with the the Google Provider and Lightening plug-ins for Thunderbird.

This has worked superbly for me; but I’ve been willing to put up with the fact that the Thunderbird plug-ins don’t actually do “sync” – they need a connection to t’internet in order to show me my google cals.

My colleagues are “Thunderbird curious” – But they need contact sharing, and sync to their phones.

So…

For contact sync I’m looking at -

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2533

And for Google cal-sync to phone I’m trying the free version of GooSync -

Next things… Outlook Mail Import (likely to be tough)

Mail Server replacement? When, how, with what.

So far, the process has been a fairly predictable mix of frustration (“how the hell do I set up styles in OpenOffice Writer???”) and pleasant surprises (“oooh… actually that’s pretty cool…”).

But now I’ve encountered my first proper bug… and it’s annoying the hell out of me.

All I want to do is add a set of “standard” colours to open office… Here’s a subset of them..

So… how hard can that be?

All you do is open Tools>Options, then select Colors from the treeview and you get a lovely dialog-box that allows you to edit/add/remove colours from the standard set.

“How hard can that be?”

It’s a piece of cake. Except when OO crashes…

I can add one color, but if I add a second in the same session (ie without closing OO and restarting) it crashes – EVERY time.

Now, I’m motivated enough to -

1. keep going
2. down-load the latest release (Since I’m on 2.3.0 and 2.3.1 is now GA c)
3. register with OpenOffice in order to look at the bug tracker and report the bug if it is still present in the latest release

But I’m not “normal” in this regard. My Mum, for example, would give up – concluding that OO “doesn’t work”….

As it happens, the download of version 2.3.1 has eliminated this bug, so everything’s tickety-boo, except that I’m slightly annoyed that I have to download the entire OO suite to move from 2.3.0 to 2.3.1