District bureau is responsible for the direct support of citizens of Berlin's district Spandau

eGrouWare provides full supply of e-mail and groupware functions for the district bureau of Spandau in Berlin

The district bureau is responsible for the direct support of citizens of Berlin's district Spandau. This begins with residents' registration, covers concerns of juvenile welfare services, but does not even end with attendance of schools, sportive installations and kitas.

Due to the fact, that e-mail became generally accepted as menas of communication, it was urgently neccessary to provide e-mail to all officers, who are in direct contact with citizens and other administrative units, with e-mail. By means of labour organization, there was likewise a demand for groupware functions like e.g. scheduler.

For easier acceptance of the users, labeling buttons and switches in german language was neccessary as well.

After a failed attempt with a different software, we discovered eGrouWare.

eGrouWare offers as OSS all required functions and comes with a modern functional design. This facilitates the migration from the usual mail clients.

Since beginning of Feb. 2004, eGrouWare is running in production environment. We are still involved in setting up the users. Currently there are 900 active users but in final stage, there will be 1200 to 1400 users, who will work with this system.

eGrouWare is running on a Dual Xeon 2GHz-machine with 6 GB RAM, same amount of swap space and a RAID-5 disk array.

The server software is based on Debian Linux (Woody), postfix, cyrus, apache, postgresql, OpenLDAP, php4 as well as the php-accelerator mmcache.

Problems at installation and administration:

• Because eGrouware supports a lot of databases and their development moves sometimes with large steps, sometimes problems occurred upgrading to new releases.
  
  
• For administration it would be helpful,to be able to display all current sessions and terminate them at once to perform administrative tasks.
  

Stablility and Performance from the very beginning, the software runs stable The performance runs on the required level and can be increased by some measures. Because we were aware of this software being Open Source Software, we adapted with the support and contacted the developers as well as external knowledge.

Andre Claussen