[Hidden-tech] hosted service for Contacts Management

Jonathan Dill jfdill at jfdill.com
Thu Jun 2 06:51:17 EDT 2005


Hello folks,

Just to give you a brief update, I have decided to concentrate on 
egroupware (htttp://www.egroupware.com) using the Ubuntu Linux platform 
(http://www.ubuntulinux.org).  In fact, I already have a demo platform 
up and running very well for a couple days now, that was my Memorial Day 
weekend project.  Last night's tweak was getting mmcache PHP accelerator 
installed and running, and that made a huge boost in performance.  In 
the next week or so, I expect to get egroupware's Content Management 
System (CMS) and WikiWiki clone configured and start documenting 
everything on there.

I selected egroupware because it is already a fairly mature product, it 
has most of the features that I wanted, and it turns out to be already 
in the Ubuntu Linux "Universe" repository, which is basically a 
moderated collection of user-contributed software packages for Ubuntu.  
I selected Ubuntu Linux because it is based on the Debian distribution 
and keeps the "always free as in beer" philosophy and adds to that a 
regular 6 month release cycle and many useability improvements over 
stock Debian.  Ubuntu also has corporate sponsorship from Canonical Ltd 
which has been sponsoring some of the core Debian developers, which 
benefits the Debian distribution as well.

In terms of business model, the idea is to resell Virtual Dedicated 
Servers (VDS) with egroupware on Ubuntu pre-installed and configured.  
There are already companies out there selling egroupware hosting for as 
cheap as $5 a month, but these appear to be basically run of the mill 
web hosting with some sort of auto-install script to get the basic 
egroupware installed, but I don't know how functional the resulting 
installation is or if it requires a lot of additional tweaking.  So I 
think the real "product" will probably be services around the egroupware 
hosting--product support, training, customization, content management, 
importing existing customer data to the egroupware platform, and so on.

Jonathan




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