manufacturers for furnitures use eGroupWare

Móveis Gaudencio www.gaudencio.com.br is one of the biggest manufacturers of furniture of Latin America. Located in Restinga Seca - RS(192 miles/307 km of Porto Alegre). Also it is part of the group the Móveis Oggi www.oggi.com.br, responsible for the infanto-youthful line of furniture, installed in Curitiba-PR.

In the last year the migration of diverse systems of the company forGNU/Linux was initiated, between them of e-mail. For this theQmail-Courier-Vpopmail-MySQL combination was used. After this theMS-Outlook97 was used to access the mailboxes and with this it only remained to choose a webmail. However, the IT team desired a bolder solution. Theavailable open source Groupware solutions had been analyzed. Even being indevelopment branch (April 2003), the tests with eGroupware had beeninitiated, it revealed extremely malleable to the necessities of the company.

When choosing GNU/Linux and eGroupware, the main concern of the company was about the support. As great part of the projects opensource, the community that surrounds the project supplies the necessary support to the use, besides possessing the option of sponsored development (Companies should find a way to pay the effort of the core team so new features and versions come more quickly).

Initially, the Red Hat Linux was adopted, but after the discontinuity of the project, the servers had been migrated to Fedora Core 1 for the easiness,but in a near future they will be being moved to Debian. Currently the mail-EGW server is a no-brand machine, with processor Pentium IV 1.6 GHz,512 MB of ram, SCSI 20GB (10K RPM). We have 250 registered users, 100 of them simultaneously in the biggest part of the day.

As in almost every change, the most difficult part was the beginnning. The phase of adaptation of the users and the comparison with the old email client were inevitable, but a time shown the new functionalities and the satisfaction curve was improved. With the arrival of new features as drag-and-drop messages, connection with handhelds, only int historical records the old mail solution will be remembered =)

I´ll take the chance to thank all the community for the offered support (specially the core team), and as well as congratulate all of us for the adoption of opensource software as solution.

Orlando Gentile