About the Project

Intro

Scalable OGo (SOGo) is a free groupware server focused on scalability instead of depth in functionality. The web interface uses human readable URLs and can be accessed according to REST web service ideas. It requires no server side session. The server stores its data in the iCalendar and vCard formats and therefore has no data model inconsistencies with native clients - it easily connects using GroupDAV connectors. Scalable OpenGroupware.org has been in development since August 2004.

History

In spring 2004 Skyrix AG was contacted by the service provider of a large French ministry to help with deploying the OpenGroupware.org server. The goal was to provide groupware services to the 60,000 employees of the ministry.

Since the regular OGo server was designed for depth in functionality instead of raw speed or scalability, it was not suitable for workgroups of that size. But being based on a highly modular set of frameworks (SOPE), it was easy to reuse the existing code for a completely new application, focused on driving hundreds of thousands of users in a cost efficient way. This proposal was then funded by the ministry and the ScalableOGo project was born - and brought forward by our contributors.

In 2006 Inverse decided to use ScalableOGo as the basis for the groupware ventures of the company. To make SOGo suitable for their goals, Inverse put a lot of work into the improvements of the SOGo web interface and enhanced the Mozilla clients with plugins to better support SOGo.

Today ScalableOGo lives on as SOGo at sogo.nu, in a state where it is being used as a free software solution for large scale groupware projects around the world.

Contributors

SOGo relies on the SOPE frameworks for almost all of its functionality. So be sure to thank the SOPE contributors as well!

Helge Heß

Developed the concept of the ScalableOGo server, designing a web application to host hundreds of thousands of users. Helge implemented large parts of the initial ScalableOGo server and is the project lead of the OpenGroupware.org project.

Wolfgang Sourdeau

Wolfgang is certainly the most active ScalableOGo developer. He designed and implemented the new AJAX-heavy interface and provides a constant stream of bugfixes for SOGo and SOPE.

Ludovic Marcotte

The team leader of Inverse also happens to be an excellent software developer. Ludovic implemented an Oracle OCI connector for SOPE/SOGo and prototyped the native Funambol connector.

Marcus Mueller

Marcus implemented large parts of the initial SOGo web interface. He worked on AJAX recipient boxes and dynamic attachment upload.

Early Project Members

In addition to the core developers, Maxime Wacker, Francois Armand and Sylvain Lhullier did a lot of supporting work in the early stages of the development.