andGroup-Office is an open source collaboration platform developed by Intermesh, a Netherlands-based company. It brings together email, calendars, file sharing, CRM, and project management under one roof.
It works through a web browser and syncs with desktop/mobile apps using standard protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV). Organizations use it for customer management, support workflows, and team collaboration.
Now, the developers have delivered Group-Office 26.0 with many major additions.
Group-Office 26.0: What to Expect?
The Collabora Online integration has been moved from the paid tier to the open source Community package. This was made possible due to the partnership with Collabora, which has now introduced collaborative document editing for all users.
With this, you can edit Microsoft Office and OpenDocument files in your browser, and multiple people can work on the same document at once without needing to rely on external tools.
Next up is the new Kanban module (shown above) that has arrived for easy visual workflow management. You can create boards with custom columns and drag tasks between the various stages as work moves forward.
Time approval is another new addition that has come to the Projects module, which already had time tracking. Managers can review time entries and approve or reject them before they are recorded. In practice, this keeps billable hours accurate and expenses in check.
The Support module has dropped the user account requirement for customers, and support tickets can now be submitted and tracked without making people register first.
Then there's the new Forms module that has debuted in a beta state. It lets users build custom forms, add questions, assign recipients, and send them via email for feedback or data collection. The data can also be exported to spreadsheets once a form is closed.
Wrapping up, three modules were rebuilt with the GOUI framework. Notes, Bookmarks, and Comments now run on updated code that performs better and stays in tune with newer platform bits.
Install It
The Group-Office team provides two ways of getting the application. One is by self-hosting it on your infrastructure; the other is by signing up for a paid plan managed by them.
Pricing ranges from €12/month for a single user all the way to €400 for 100 users (a 30-day free trial is also available). You can refer to the project's GitHub repository and documentation for the source code and installation instructions.
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Sourav Rudra
