Group Hug

Individual or business, almost every Internet user now owns numerous user accounts with social web services. Juggling and coordinating these accounts is not simple: Friends chat on Facebook and colleagues network on Xing, and they all wait for tweets on Twitter. On-demand, modern groupware systems like Open-Xchange and Zarafa tap into the data of the social web and merge it with existing data (a server-side mashup). Groupware users thus automatically find their contacts from Facebook, for example, in their address books – or at least that’s the basic idea.

Open-Xchange

The Open-Xchange Groupware (OX) product is backed by the eponymous company in Nuremberg, Germany; the company in turn has its origins in the SUSE environment with SLOX (SUSE Linux Open-Xchange Server). Besides commercial versions, a free Community Edition is released under the GPLv2. Customers of 1&1 should be familiar with OX; the company uses the groupware as a hub for its email services in one hosting variant named of MailXchange.