Shared Contacts for Small Biz Solution?

[sb73542]

Hi,

I'm the network admin at a small business, which currently runs Windows. I have been desperately searching for some sort of open source solution that will allow us to have a shared contact list, available from the address book of Outlook >=2000 or Thunderbird 1.x. All users need to be able to add/modify contacts as necessary, and their changes need to become available to all users more or less automatically with a short period of time. As basic a request as this is, I simply can not find ANY free solutions, after several years of scouring the internet. Neither Outlook nor Thunderbird can write to an LDAP server, and we can not afford Exchange. None of the viable OSS Exchange clones run on Windows, and I can't convince my boss to authorize a switch to Linux. I was wondering if SugarCRM might have a solution, seeing that it already supports manual import/export of contacts, and it runs on Windows. Any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

[ftreml]

Hi,
Sugar can do this for you, but not for free ... you require the Outlook Plugin, which is available for around 40USD per user per year, AFAIK.
Florian

[sb73542]

Thanks for the reply! And how about Thunderbird?

[stevec]

The problem you might have with the outlook plugin is that it (as I understand it) will only sync a contact with outlook for the 'owner' of the contact. So there would be limitations on sharing contacts.



If it wasn't for your boss not wanting Linux as a server, the perfect thing for you would be http://www.scalix.com/.

[sb73542]

Thanks again. Yes, I've had my eye on Scalix, it looks really good. I really need to implement Linux. But until then..... I was hoping there would be a good free solution for Win32.

Any idea if v-t-i-g-e-r might do the trick? (Why do they have filtering enabled for that word?)

Thanks!