Moving from eGroupWare?

Will it really be possible to make an easy transition from eGroupware?

One problem is that Felamimail is proving difficult to use because of it's slowness.

I'm drawn to using google apps as it works nicely with my iphone. I never got a mobile solution that worked with egw. eg caledar sharing is working well, with multiple calendars.

The important issue centres around migrating the addressbook. At present, by using different eGw addressbooks we have grouped contacts for different Churches in the Circuit, and also for some departmental groups at The Crossing Church & Centre eg 'cafe contacts', 'mark's work contacts' etc etc. By doing this we have been able to control which eGw users see which contacts. By also using categories we have been able to sub-sort groups of contacts.

Even if we import all users into our google domain as shared contacts using the shared contacts API I don't see how we can replicate the granular control we previously had? Does the API work with the free (standard) version of google apps? (This program only works with pro/education versions. This is an example of the kind of software application that can be developed using the API.)

In the short term perhaps this is not an issue. In reality the eGw addressbook is rarely used for creating printed lists of members etc, as they can only be printed from the web application in a basic form. Accessing the SQL database directly for the purposes of creating reports has proved tricky as well, although in theory that should be quite possible.

I found importing the vcf export of the eGw addressbook into my google account worked very well (with the exception of the birthday field). This does not make the contacts shared however, that needs doing by the API.

A quick and dirty short-term solution could be to let every user import their own contact list using the the vcf? These lists would soon be come unsyncronised of course. Would that matter as long as someone held the master one which records Church membership?

Interesting example of what someone in another profession (legal) to achieve many of things above here
hmm