eGroupWare helping to the Indians in Brazil

The National Foundation of the Indian - FUNAI is the agency of the Brazilian federal government that establishes and executes the Indians Politics in Brazil. means that the FUNAI is responsible for promoting the basic education to the Indians, demarcating, to assure and to protect lands for traditionally busy them, to stimulate the development of studies and surveys on the Indians groups, to defend the Indians Communities, to awake the interest of the national society for the Indians and its causes, to manage its patrimony and to keep its lands, hindering the predatory actions of gold washers, lumber and any other that they occur inside of its limits and that they represent a risk to the life and the preservation of these peoples. It is not a simple task and it requires one high degree of inter personal relationship. In the center of this process we find eGroupWare.

Installed and kept for Allan Cassaro Vilela Gomes, eGroupware already counts on 367 registered in and active users. Being himself a defender of free software Allan it opted to installing eGroupWare in a Debian platform (Woody 3, 0 rc2), currently it is twirling on the Kernel 2.6.x. running an Apache server with 4 PHP and using Mysql as database . The platform of the hardware also used is not what we could call modest. There is one system Dell 6400 (4 Pentium II 700) with 2 Gbytes of RAM and 1 Gbyte of swap, beyond RAID 5 with 5 HD’s SCSI. The power excess guarantees the maintenance of the system in air and free space for upgrades. We did a small interview with Allan.

Which had been the main problems found in the installation and the implantation?
The creation of groups of users was the part most laborious. I very liked the use of data base for the maintenance of contacts, gained in speed and flexibility over OpenLDAP 2. As we use a Proxy (Squid) we had some problems of login that they had been decided with the configuration of the proper Squid.

The system if has shown stable?
Yes very. It never stopped, nor showed problems.

How it has been the support?
This part is a little delicate. As GPL software, it does not possess commercial guarantees. However the support offered for the list of e-mails and the speed that the developers eliminate bugs substitutes a warranty with advantages. I need to stand out that as I have good knowledge in *nix and the entire platform that we use, so I did not find no great difficulty.

The existing documentation is good?
Very Good, Unhappily, practically all documentation is in English. *.

Already is being mounted a group of support to eGroupware in Brazil that is translating all the documentation and resells the translation of all the screens.


Frank Alcantara