Q: Is OGo's software in a state where it can be downloaded and put to immediate testing and use? In other words, if I download it now, will it work and what will it work with?

A: Yes! OGo is a direct descendant of the SKYRiX 4.1 groupware server which is stable for years. So the sources can be considered stable.
Note: OGo currently only provides packages build nightly for a limited set of distributions (Debian and glibc 2.3 based RPMs). So if you are Linux beginner you might consider consulting your local Linux administrator, buy a SKYRiX distribution or just use the Knoppix for testing:
The simplest way to get something up quickly is to use the Knoppix CD which was contained in issue 08/2003 of the German 'Linux Magazin'. If you can't get your hands on this magazine, you can also download the ISO file from one of the ISO mirrors.

A: No. OGo is something between a mixture of Exchange and SharePoint portal server. It focuses on groupware and collaboration instead of messaging, e.g. OGo will not provide its own mail server but rather use existing ones like Cyrus (see the mission on that).

A: SuSE OpenExchange is actually two things: an OpenSource messaging server based on Cyrus and OpenLDAP and web groupware server (ComFire).

OGo is very similiar to the groupware server part (German users can check the Linux Magazin article on that) and indeed you can install OGo as the groupware component on an OpenExchange server.

Q: In what languages is OGo available in? Is it easy to translate to other languages? What are your plans?

A: OGo is fully localized in English and German. There are contributed localizations for Danish, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch and Português do Brasil.
Actually localization of the application itself is *very* easy and straightforward, all "strings" and images are kept separate from the code and the application itself uses Unicode.
As always there is a but ... In the moment the core library (libFoundation) of OGo does only really work well with 8bit strings, more specifically, with ISO Latin 1 :-( So while the API is Unicode, the internals only implement the lower 8 bits of it, so it currently can't host complex languages like Japanese or Chinese.
But we also have a very good plan on this :-) It should be pretty easy to port OGo from libFoundation to GNUstep-base and GNUstep-base provides full support for Unicode and therefore almost any language.

A: In general, if you want to contribute, write an email to contribute@opengroupware.org. Please give us some time to respond in the setup stage (we are getting loads of emails these days)!
Right now the best thing to contribute is to check whether the packages we provide actually work and that the webserver has no bugs! If you find problems, please send a description to feedback@opengroupware.org.
We are going to post some ideas on possible contributions in the next weeks (we have loads of them as well ;-).

Q: What SQL database backends are supported? Do you support MySQL? Firebird? SAP-DB? MaxDB?

A: The gnustep-db supports a pluggable database backend mechanism. The OGo source distribution comes with database adaptors for PostgreSQL and FrontBase, Sybase and Oracle adaptors are part of the SKYRiX 5 distribution and not part of the OGo source tree.
OGo is open for the contribution of additional database backend adaptors, but having support for a perfectly suitable OpenSource database, PostgreSQL, we see no immediate need to extend OGo for MySQL or other database on our own.
Does it work with JDBC: no, OGo is not a Java application. Does it work with ODBC (eg unixODBC): no, not currently, though it might be viable to write a generic ODBC adaptor for OGo.

Q: Does this run on OSX? Windows? Atari :-)

A: We currently provide binary packages for RPM and DEB based GNU/Linux distributions. The sources should work on any Intel based GNU/Linux without issues and they do work on SPARC/Solaris. Further the sources are ported to the IBM iSeries platform running Linux and are known to work on various BSD platforms.
Most of the core libraries already work on MacOS X. To build a complete MacOSX port we have started the MacOSX porting project.
Concerning Windows, check our mission document. We are not actively working on it, but have it on the radar ;-)
Finally, the sources should compile without major issues on any Unix(tm) like operating system which is able to host GCC and GNU make. If you managed to build on your specific platform, please send us feedback.

Q: I had a look at the OGo Scrennshots, it seems to be possible to connect Mozilla Calendar to OGo. How does this work?

A: The Mozilla Calendar (like Apple iCal.app) can fetch iCalendar files using the HTTP protocol. The OGo ZideStore server is able to generate those iCalendar files from the database on the fly.
Note that Mozilla Calendar provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental. It works pretty well for viewing calendars, less well for changing ones. It's on our todo list to see how we can extend Mozilla Calendar to interoperate in a better way with OGo.
Our architecture diagram may also explain some things on a high-level view.

Q: It seems a bit confusing regards Outlook functionality though - at one place in your website you say the commercial version has ZideStore but in another place you say that ZideStore will be open-souced?

A: Again a look at the architecture diagram might help to understand. The Outlook connectivity needs two pieces of software, a so called MAPI Storage Provider (ZideLook) which is an Outlook plugin that maps MAPI to WebDAV, and the WebDAV middleware server (ZideStore) which translates WebDAV requests to calls to the OGo business logic.
The ZideLook plugin is closed source, the ZideStore server is OpenSource. That makes sense since the ZideStore server is also the integration point to a lot of other clients (like Evolution, iCalendar/HTTP clients, Glow).

Q:

A: No, this is correct. ZideStore implements required parts of the Exchange 2000 WebDAV API to allow access to the OGo database from Evolution (with the Ximian Connector).
Update 2004-11-11: ZideStore again supports a certain set of operations with Connection 2.0. A contributor provides a gateway which enhances this functionality, see the OGo/Evolution list archives.
Update 2004-05-14: Novell Ximian now released the Exchange Connector as free (GPL) software! Due to this we are probably going to see a free and completely operable OpenGroupware.org connector for Evolution soon.
In the moment this does not resolve the issue that ZideStore only works with Ximian Connector 1.2 and that the new 1.4 version is not supported. Yet having the source available open incompatibility issue are now much easier to resolve.
Update 2003-08: OGo got an email from the Evolution project manager: "We would love to see native OpenGroupware plugins for Evolution being written." :-)
The OGo related connector development is hosted in the OGo Evolution Connector Project. Feel free to join the subproject!

Q: When I press the logout button, the application seems to crash.

A: No, the application doesn't crash, this is a clean exit. This happens because in the SKYRIX distribution the application is started by the load balancing daemon (snsd), which is not part of OGo.
Update 2004-11-11: Starting with OGo 1.0a alpha releases this issue should not happen anymore, OGo is no preconfigured for automatic restart (using the WOWatchDogEnabled default). Do not set the OGoMinimumActiveSessionCount default as sometimes suggested in the users list.

Q: How do I get OGo to connect to PostgreSQL?

A: You need to ensure two things:

1) You need to configure your PostgreSQL server to allow TCP/IP connections. You can do this by setting the "tcpip_socket" variable to "true" in the postgresql.conf file (usually located in ~postgres/data).
Some older PostgreSQL daemons (prior 7.0) need to be started with the "-i" commandline option.

2) You need to patch your pg_hba.conf to allow TCP/IP host connections.
Example (for PostgreSQL 7.3):

local   all         all                                            trust
host    all         all         127.0.0.1         255.255.255.0    trust
host    all         all         0.0.0.0           255.255.255.255  reject

Example (for PostgreSQL 7.2):

local           all                                            trust
host            all         127.0.0.1         255.255.255.0    trust
host            all         0.0.0.0           255.255.255.255  reject

To get a secure setup, replace trust with password, md5 or something else (depends on your PostgreSQL version).

Don't forget to restart PostgreSQL after applying the changes! (e.g. /etc/init.d/postgresql restart)

You can check whether the TCP/IP configuration worked, by running psql:

psql -h localhost OGo OGo

(This assumes that you have created a database named "OGo" and a database user named "OGo")

Q:

A: The configuration of the server is incomplete. Try executing those:

Defaults write NSGlobalDomain LSAdaptor PostgreSQL
Defaults write NSGlobalDomain LSModelName OpenGroupware.org_PostgreSQL

psql -h localhost OGo OGo

Q: I can access the Web interface but all the images are missing!

A: Images are looked up in /usr/local/share/opengroupware.org-1.0a/www (was ~opengroupware/WebServerResources in pre-1.0a releases!).
Ensure that the directory exists, contains the images and that your Apache configuration properly maps the directory to /OpenGroupware10a.woa/WebServerResources as described in the install guide.

Q:

A: You need to configure the NGBundlePath default which is used to lookup OGo components.
On Debian GNU/Linux:
  Defaults write NSGlobalDomain NGBundlePath /usr/lib/opengroupware.org/Library/OpenGroupware.org
On RPM based distributions:
  Defaults write NSGlobalDomain NGBundlePath /opt/opengroupware.org/Library/OpenGroupware.org

Q: Got everything installed/compiled. Now, how do I start OGo?

A: Login as GNU/Linux user opengroupware and start the application with ogo-webui-1.0a. Remember to setup Apache and load the PostgreSQL database schema prior attempting to start OGo.

Q:

A: This was a bug in the packages. You can fix it by editing ~opengroupware/Library/OpenGroupware.org/LSBase.cmd/bundle-info.plist and change LSModel.model to OGo.model. With the current packages this issue is fixed.

Q: When trying to start OGo, I get a floating point exception!

A:

This problem seems to be a result of NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library for Linux) that comes with Red Hat 9. Try setting the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable before starting OGo:

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

If that doesn't solve the problem, please provide feedback on the users mailing list!

Update 2004-11-11: This issue is fixed beginning with OGo 1.0a releases, so you don't need to set the mentioned variable anymore.

Q:

A: We had a dependency problem in the packages which are solved in the meantime. Just get new packages from our server. Sorry for the inconvenience, we need some time to fix all bugs in this brand new website (yes, we know, there are no excuses ;-)

Q: When I connect to the OGo installation, the URLs get messed up. The app tries to connect to hosts 'x' or 'wo' in my local net, which don't exist.

A: Use http://host:port/OpenGroupware to connect to OGo (substitute host and port with your local settings here). OGo needs the last part of the URL to correctly build it's URLs, so it mustn't be empty.

Q:

A: Obviously the template of the email configuration dialog is broken.
Please update installation with current opengroupware-webui packages or update your sources and rebuild OGo.

The quick fix, if you see this exception:

   cd ~opengroupware
   find . -name "LSWMailPreferences.html"

Some other template has such syntax errors aswell (we cleaned up a lot of templates prior to OGo checkin, so some might contain errors).
What did you click on? Please report to the users mailing list.

Q:

A: This is because you are connecting from a different host, OGo only accepts connections from localhost per default. For deployments it works like this:

/----------------\ Internet /--------\ local /-----\
| Browser/Client |   <->    | Apache |  <->  | OGo |
\----------------/          \--------/       \-----/

Defaults write OpenGroupware WOHttpAllowHost \
  '(localhost, myhost.mydomain)' 

  -WOHttpAllowHost '(localhost, "myhost.mydomain")'

Q:

A: Ensure that you have installed the WebUI Resources Package (opengroupware-webui-resource-[de|en]-latest.[rpm|dep] or /WebUI/Resources if u got the source).
In your OGo home directory (~opengroupware) there should be a Resource subdir containing language projects like like English.lproj or German.lproj.
Therein the files OGoResourceScheduler.string and OGoScheduler.strings should contain the missing labels.

We just checked the packages from July, 21st. They seem to be alright.

Q: When trying to add a new news article (as root and also as a user with news rights), I get following error:

SKYRIX:
newsArticle::new: LSDBObjectCommandException newsarticle::new failed:
error during save of news article picture

A: If you want to use the news editor you need to define some additional Defaults. The paths shown here are these used within the DEB packages, if you use RPM, substitute /usr/lib with /opt.

Defaults write NSGlobalDomain LSNewsImagesUrl '/ArticleImages'
Defaults write NSGlobalDomain LSNewsImagesPath \
         '/usr/lib/opengroupware.org/news'

Alias /ArticleImages /usr/lib/opengroupware.org/news

umask 003

Q: How do I activate LDAP authentication and configure it to authenticate users against my server?

A: To enable LDAP authentication you need to set at least these defaults:

Defaults write NSGlobalDomain \
  LSAuthLDAPServer '"myserver.de"'

Defaults write NSGlobalDomain \
  LSAuthLDAPServerRoot '"dc=opengroupware,dc=org"'

This makes OGo use a simple bind (ldapsearch -x) against the LDAP server to check credentials. OGo currently uses LDAPv2 for maximum interoperability.

Note that with LDAP authentication enabled OGo still needs to create an account record in the PostgreSQL database. This is done when a user logs in the first time and was successfully authenticated by LDAP (the user is taken to a welcome-page where he can decide whether to proceed).

Q: When trying to add an new enterprise/company, I get following error:

SKYRIX: Unknown error. Could not save document!

A: On creation of an Enterprise record a Project for that Enterprise is created as well. This apparently is failing in your setup. Please ensure you can create projects or documents in them either.

Verify that LSAttachmentPath ('~opengroupware/documents/') is set up correctly. Check the installation for permission problems, if necessary set permissions of LSAttachmentPath to 700 owned by opengroupware.skyrix.

Q: When I try to start the server, I get the error message:

  Cannot load adaptor bundle 'PostgreSQL72'

  Full output is:

  Jul 13 10:08:29 OpenGroupware [376]: SNS disabled.
  dynamic load (dlopen) error:
  libpq.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  Jul 13 10:08:29 OpenGroupware [376]: Cannot load adaptor bundle 'PostgreSQL72'
  Uncatched Objective-C exception:
  exceptionClass 
  Reason: Cannot load adaptor bundle 'PostgreSQL72'
  UserInfo: no userinfo

A: The Packages are built on a PostgreSQL 7.2 system. Symlink libpq.so.3 to libpq.so.2:

    su -
    cd /usr/lib/
    ln -s libpq.so.3 libpq.so.2

    ldconfig

Q:

A:

This issue is almost always a permission problem. User defaults are stored in the filesystem and could not be written when this error is shown.

The directory where defaults are stored is configured using the LSAttachmentPath default and is preconfigured to /var/lib/opengroupware.org/documents.

Check the LSAttachmentPath configuration by executing one of the following commands:

`Defaults read NSGlobalDomain LSAttachmentPath`
`Defaults read ogo-webui-1.0a LSAttachmentPath`

If OGo cannot write the path or including files, it either is missing, the disk is full or the permissions are wrong. Starting OGo as with:

strace -e open ogo-webui-1.0a -WOUseWatchDog NO

might help in locating the problem.

Q: After starting OpenGroupware.org I get the following exeption:

Uncatched Objective-C exception:
exceptionClass 
Reason: File not found: decimalDigitCharacterSet
UserInfo: {
   filename = decimalDigitCharacterSet;
}

A: This happened with old CVS packages when the GNUstep environment was not loaded. The issue should not come up with OGo 1.0a.
"decimalDigitCharacterSet" is part of libFoundation and is located in /usr/local/share/libFoundation/.

Q: A few packages show me that they depend on another package but as soon as I try to install this package it shows me that it depends on the package I've tried to install before

A: You can pass multiple packages as arguments to RPM:

  rpm -Uvh package_A package_B

Q: How can i configure custom appointment types?

A: Execute the following command to add custom appointment types.

Defaults write NSGlobalDomain SkyScheduler_customAppointmentTypes \
'({icon="myApptypeIcon.gif";label="my appointment type";type="my_apptype"})'

SkyScheduler_customAppointmentTypes = (
  {
    icon = "myApptypeIcon.gif";
    label = "my appointment type";
    type = "my_apptype";
  }
);

The 'myApptypeIcon.gif' must be present in the WebServerResources directory /usr/local/share/opengroupware-1.0a/www/English.lproj.