Hi!
Norman here.
I’m working at a small not-for-profit ISP cooperative in western Quebec
(Canada) and I’ve been tasked to create an application using eGroupware
to manage our growing services. We provide high speed internet access
to our members by fiber optics in densely populated areas (half our
members) and by microwave in sparsely populated areas (the other half).
Till now, we used OTRS to manage the list of members with their IP
adresses, with a growing number of locally developped utilities to
measure (and charge) the traffic usage of each member, while all
accounting was done using Sage50, an inexpensive accounting program
running under Windows (all other applications run on Debian Linux
systems).
OTRS has proved to be too difficult to customise for our changing and
growing needs, so we decided to replace it with a more integrated
set of applications that would also be easier to adapt and to expand
with new locally-built applications.
After examining a largish number of groupware-like softwares, we
found that eGroupware was the best fit for our needs, with only two
missing functionnalities: (a) a module to manage our membership list
and (b) a module to manage the collection and facturation of our
members internet traffic.
Module (a) seems to be reasonably easy to implement by extending the
current addressbook module with appropriate fields and templates for
our application, while module (b) would require integrating a new
application (databases, templates and sundry php code) into the
eGroupware package.
So, I downloaded eGroupware 14.1 in late november, then started
digging into the documentation as found on the egroupware.org web
site. I read the Application Development Guide (that seems to be
partially obsolete) and I am now trying to follow Klaus Leithoff’s
Code Corner mini course as found on the community wiki (albeit with
some difficulties, as some parts of the course look quite elliptic
to me: the author alludes to things that must be done without
indicating how they can be done), so I’m spending a lot of time
rummaging through the code searching, for instance, for a way to
debug the template test.index.rows (and/or its use) in Day 5, in
order to get it to display the data from the database in the table
instead of only in the DebugInfos section at the top of the
test.index template…
So, some words of advice from knowledgeable users/developers of
eGroupware would be gratefully acknowledged, as I feel a bit
overwhelmed by the size of the task at hand… 
As for myself, I’ve started programming in 1972 while a graduate
student in chemistry and I’ve kept at it ever since, but I’m more
a computer systems developer than a real applications developer.
Thanks for any help or advice.
Norman.
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