Re: Collabograte project

[Kartik Subbarao <subbarao@computer.org>]

On 03/03/2012 08:11 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>
>
> On 01/03/12 22:17, Kartik Subbarao wrote:
>> I'm integrating OpenLDAP as an LDAP Directory component in the open
>> source Collabograte project that I recently announced:
>>
>> http://kartiksubbarao.com/announcing-collabograte
>
> I think this is interesting and very worthwhile.  There are similar
> projects like FusionForge, some of them use OpenLDAP.  Can you
> elaborate on what makes Collabograte distinctive from those other
> alternatives?

The primary audience for Collabograte is IT integrators who want to 
assemble their own custom services from individual collaboration 
components that they choose. Collabograte helps them with the heavy 
lifting of integration -- connecting the dots between these different 
components. For example, in the role of "LDAP Directory Component", 
Collabograte can provide configurations for a number of LDAP servers. 
OpenLDAP is the first one that it supports, but there is no restriction 
on the products that can be supported. The same is true for any other 
category of component. So down the line, Collabograte might support 5 
different OSes, 4 different LDAP servers, 3 different Wikis, etc.

Over time, someone could build a FusionForge out of Collabograte and 
make it generally available on the Internet (it's all open source, 
people can do whatever they want), but that's not the focal point of 
Collabograte itself. With Collabograte, I'm more interested in building 
a community of IT integrators than in providing services directly to end 
users. To put it in LDAP terms, Collabograte is more of an auxiliary 
class than a structural class :-)

>> I'd be very interested in hearing any comments, ideas, suggestions, or
>> questions you might have on this. I want to help Enterprise IT do a
>> better job of integrating open source into their environments, as well
>> as improve the collaboration between Enterprise IT and open source
>> project communities.
>
> Other popular collaboration apps that come to mind are MoinMoin,
> Bugzilla, mailman

Thanks for the application suggestions.

> Do you plan to offer choice of app, e.g. someone can choose between
> Bugzilla, Mantis or RT for bug/service request handling?
>
> Or you anticipate a very tight integration with the apps you prefer?

The former, most definitely. Collabograte is all about freedom and 
choice, maximizing the options that integrators have to pick and choose 
the components they want. Basically, if someone is willing to contribute 
integration configuration for a new component, and the code meets a 
basic standard of quality, I'll lean towards accepting it. This may mean 
that not all combinations of all components will work with each other, 
but the ones people care about the most will. And I will be looking to 
build on existing work to make it more modular, get stuff pushed 
upstream where appropriate/possible, etc.

	-Kartik