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Companies and organization want and need to capitalize on the talent already on hand. Many good groupware type applications are available in Perl and Java. phpGroupWare offers an alternative in the PHP language which is very rapidly becoming a mainstay of web application developement. (and you may be surprised to find knowledgable hobbiest PHP developers already on staff!)
This project has incredible potential and many of the applications are mature enough for production use. Especially the core applications which include Webmail, calendar, address book, notes, and To-Do's among others.
Installation and configuration is easy and fast. Someone that knows their way around a webserver and their preferred SQL database (MySQL and Postgres especially) should be able to setup the default installation in 15 to 20 minutes. Someone coming at the installation of web applications with little experience should still find installation and configuration straight forward, but may spend an afternoon on it, especially if your PHP installation does not already have IMAP support.
The template system makes creating an interface customized to your organization or company a simple thing. Though there are still some inconsistencies in the template system they are easily overcome. I found that modifying one of the existing templates easily more consistent than simply adding one. It is especially true if you choose to NOT give your end users the option to change their themes and template choices which is the direction most likely to be used in a corporate environment.
The user interface is reasonably intuitive for most of the applications. This project demonstrates that there are exceptions to the open source reputation of "by programmers for programmers" rather than "by programmers for end users".
Though I must state that for less experienced end-users navigation of the email client needs to be more consistent as some of the action options are at the top while others (such as compose and delete) are at the bottom. And some options are standard text links and some are image buttons. This is a quick fix for most who are not afraid to tinker and who are familiar with other (possibly more intuitive) webmail clients such as Twig, NeoMail, IMP, or Obsidian's aging OCS. And it is really more of a placement, style and preference issue rather than a programming one.
A big plus of the email client is the ability to set site/server wide defaults for the mail server, server type (POP & IMAP are supported in their various incarnations). If the user account information then is matched to the mail accounts accessing mail is transparent to the end user where configuration is concerned. An up and coming option is for account authentication via the mail server. While this feature can be enabled now I have been unsuccessful in making it work. Until this is a reliable feature I've resigned myself to the necessity of creating mail and groupware accounts seperately, a redundancy I do not anticipate will last very long.
The application can also make use of LDAP for addresses, authentication information, etc. I have yet to experiment with this feature but have it high on my list of things to try. This feature will be especially impressive in Corporate environments that are using some form of LDAP already (i.e. Microsoft's ADS, OpenLDAP or Novell's NDS).
And in the tradition of many open source projects documenation is limited and seems to concentrate on API documenation over end-user documentation. As this project has not reached its 1.0 release I'm sure the documentation will catch up.
Overall this package offers developers a nice API framework and IT professionals and hobbiests a great starting point for an Intranet or Extranet. This package is worth your time to investigate (especially) if you are considering an expensive option such as Exchange and are fearful that no one will actually use it. (which I have unfortunately seen happen many times)
