Citadel

Full featured groupware appliance to replace Exchange and Lotus Domino.

Summary

Businesses today need a simple, full featured, cost effective suite for collaboration that does not lock them into a certain platform or product. Unfortunately items such as Exchange and Lotus continue to be the solution of choice. This isn't because Exchange or Lotus are great but due to open source alternatives are timely to setup, configure and integrate into existing systems.

Citadel is the simplest groupware server to setup and manage. Citadel provides a wealth of functionality such as email, calendaring/scheduling, address books, bulletin boards, mailing list server, instant messaging, multiple domain support and even includes a modern AJAX-style web interface. Citadel also supports most major mail clients natively or via third party plugin.

Setup Overview

The following assumes the following: A working installation of TurnKey Core, updated and patched of course. A fully qualified domain name, (optional). Installation Instructions

• Citadel requires a few items from Hardy repos. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list and uncomment the repos EXCEPT hardy-backports.
• Add Citadels repo to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list. Repo URL: deb http://ubuntu.citadel.org/ubuntu/ hardy main
• Update APT: apt-get update
• Install Citadel: apt-get install citadel-suite
• Follow the prompts and accept the defaults.
• Once the install is done open the servers IP in a browser and login to Citadel with username Administrator and leave the password blank.
• On the left hand menu select Administration -> User account management -> Add, change, delete user accounts. Select Administrator and set the password.

At this point the server is good to go. You can either allow users to create accounts or manually add them yourself. Citadel works with most mail clients. A plugin for Outlook is available here.

Notes

You can change the default message that gets sent to new users. So maybe we want to create one for TurnKey? Integration with Spamassassin and ClamAV is possible but I haven't done much research in this area. This link provides some information on using Citadel with Spamassassin and ClamAV.

There are themes available but I haven't seen many. There is one that is very simple and easy on the eyes that I would like to possibly use for TurnKey. I want to have the TurnKey appliance to look different than a default install.

Lastly I apologize for the extremely long delay. I did a lot of research on the numerous groupware suites out there and found that NONE of them are as simple to install and deal with as Citadel. When comparing suites I focused on the following items:

• Ease of installation
• Ease of management
• Minimal dependencies
• Core functionality (limiting use of 3rd party software)
• No "crippleware" or "trialware", software must be open source
• Development activity (If its not being worked on or progress is too slow we don't want it)
• Stability
• Interoperability

So after messing with over 10+ groupware suites, Citadel was the only one I kept going back to. Also, look forward to a email archiving solution!