- EGW - EGW<->CMS brige.
I would add a comment here that a recurring requirement from customers
reviewing eGroupWare is to have a way to freely define and let the
users presonalize the layout of its interface - currently it seems to
be hardcoded for one header bar, one navigation bar to the left and a
main area for the current application.
Customers usually want some kind of an intranet portal/dashboard with
multiple elements layed out on pages - customizing front page and
putting several apps over there is a must have for them, so you can
e.g. see your calendar, announcements and a home-grown company
application at the same time after you log in.
For examples, see Java JSR-168 portal servers or MS Sharepoint. eGW
has too much of its layout stuff predetermined and hardcoded.
ACL handling standardization across all core eGW apps - that’s a
feature without which many wouldn’t even consider eGroupWare for
serious use.
Currently one cannot set ACL’s for Knowledge base articles or Wiki
pages, and it all should be handled uniformly across al eGroupWare
applications. Currently any person who can edit/publish articles in
the Knowledge Base can take anyone else’s article and edit it or even
delete it. Same for the Wiki, but in Knowledge Base this article is
lost forever (unless you have good backups) - it could use some form
of article versioning, which I hope to work on in the near future (but
have limited time resources 
).
In general, all apps could benefit from versioning of their elements
so in case anyone deletes something by accident (or changes data
replacing the old content), he can revert to the previous revision of
that object.
But versioning is a nice to have feature, while a total show stopper
for many potential eGroupWare implementations is lack of a workflow
engine in the core version.
The workflow implemented for eGW 1.2 wasn’t developed along with
eGroupWare on the way to version 1.4 so the latest version of eGW
doesn’t officially have workflow functionality.
Another feature that’s required - especially by customers who seek
replacement fo MS Sharepoint - is a full-featured DMS, which lets the
users upload documents directly from MS Office using WebDAV protocol
and have them automatically indexed for full text search.
Note that the open source components required for such functionality
are already available (e.g. PostgreSQL Tsearch2+OpenFTS or MySQL full
text search indexes; catdoc, antiword, xlhtml for extracting text from
MS Office documents), but there’s no solution that binds them all
together.
Besides, MyDMS in current incarnation is so buggy that cannot be used
at all for most uses - I’ve found the ACL system in 1.4 MyDMS to be
severly broken - e.g. after adding some group to the ACL I cannot
remove it, in fact I can add it multiple times (which makes no sense)
but cannot delete it afterwards.
For ProjectManager, the customers would love to see an add-in for MS
Project that would let them use eGroupWare instead of Project Server.
MS Project is a kind of a standard for itself in PM world and not many
users are willing to give up its familiar interface for a less
responsive web-based UI (although it would be much better if eGW
Project Manager would provide some more responsive UI through the use
of AJAX, letting users drag and drop elements of a Gantt chart).
On the API and eTemplate front, I could share my insights as I’m
trying to implement a simple application that uses the eTemplate Link
widget, but the lack of examples and little documentation makes it
very hard to do anything successfully (BTW, thanks for the helpful
answers on this list, they really helped me to move forward and I’ll
post my answers when I sort those things out later).
What would help beginning eGW/eTemplate developers are especially
small, minimal examples of working applications, targeted at
particular eTemplate widgets. Something like the eTemplate tutorial,
only smaller - possibly even without much documentation, only sample
code (archives containing fully working installable apps).
I think it would be even more helpful that Klaus Leithoff’s Code
Corner, although a step-by-step tutorial like this is also required to
get a developer started.
–
Best Regards,
Aleksander Adamowski
http://olo.org.pl
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