Mission: 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.

We find it even more important to support open protocols than to provide the source code for a groupware solution, since open protocols provide the real freedom of choice for the customer and allow integration into existing IT infrastructures.
Groupware is in a miserable state when it comes to interoperability, we try to fix that issue by cleanly documenting all the protocols used by the OGo reference server and by building protocol bridges.

Other OpenSource groupware projects like phpGroupWare or Kolab are not seen as competitors to the goal OpenGroupware.org is trying to accomplish! In contrast, given the unique nature of OpenSource projects, we can work together and learn from each other to provide the best possible solution for the target audience.

Web technologies have significant advantages in various areas. We think that a web interface is equally important as a native GUI interface and our goal is to provide a high quality, user friendly one.
We are also looking into technologies like Mozilla XUL or DHTML to improve the usability, but we are committed to provide an interface for HTML 4 "only" browsers.

While web technologies develop further and further into the traditional desktop application space, they still do not provide the same ease of use and speed of use of native applications. Further, Internet still isn't available everywhere, so we need offline solutions for mobile workers.
So we work on integrating available native clients like Outlook, Glow or Evolution.

Another major problem with a lot of current groupware solutions is that they use a proprietary data storage. We are going to use standard SQL databases, we are going to document the database schema and we are going to provide an adaptor mechanism to allow free choice of the database server.
Crucial business data is stored in groupware systems and should be readily accessible.

Groupware does not end at a calendar, it's important to enable a team to share information and that information is often held in the form of Office files, like spreadsheets, word processor documents or presentation files.
OpenGroupware.org aims to provide a central team storage and processing facility to allow easy sharing of those informations.

The state of OpenSource groupware clients isn't yet perfect, but rapidly improving. So for now we try to help those projects to build a solid groupware client and to integrate with OpenGroupware.org using standard protocols.
Yet we keep in mind that an own native client may be required to provide access to the rich collaboration functionality contained in the reference server.

We feel that it is far less important to support Windows as a server operating system than as a client operating system. A Windows port is certainly interesting, especially during evaluation, and certainly possible, but is not our primary focus.

There are excellent opensource email servers available. We see no need in writing a new one when Cyrus, Courier, Washington IMAP or Apache James provide proven solutions able to handle the largest requirements.
The services provided by the OGo groupware reference server and the services provided by an IMAP4 server complement each other perfectly.
Nevertheless we are committed in helping users and developers work with existing mail servers, by providing documentation, administrative interfaces, packages and middleware for bridging XML based protocols to IMAP4.

Just use Jabber. Period.

OpenLDAP is open source, it works, it's stable, it comes with any Linux distribution. Why build a new one ?
We are going to build mechanisms to feed the LDAP server and to access LDAP servers though. And we are going to build instructions on how to integrate OpenLDAP (or any other LDAP compliant server) into a OGo infrastructure.