Watching OBM presentation

April 16, 2008

The KickFire people stayed too long in the room before OBM, so I think they’re having to cut short the presentation - there were some display problems too which took some time.  Given that, the presentation has been good, if a bit rushed so far.  OBM has been developed in France for the past 10 years, and it looks like they’d like to get in to the US market.

The product itself is a GPL2 messaging and groupware system, with sync capabilities for Outlook, various PDAs, Thunderbird and Sunbird(!).  It also has a fairly advanced project management tool, which I got a demo of.  It’s rather complex looking, but no more so than just about any other tools.  It looks like they’d be competing against both Zimbra and Salesforce and SugarCRM.

The speed has been something Pierre (the presenter) said was has been a focus, and I think he’s on to something here.  He described some techniques they take to precomputing things like group hierarchy membership data.  He acknowledged that the data tables are much larger than they might otherwise be, but the benefit is data can be retrieved in one query, and indexed properly is lightning fast.  He laid down a friendly challenge to test out responsiveness against other messaging solutions.  I saw Zimbra last year, but it was not overly fast.  Some of the speed was achieved by a browser plugin which sped things up.  I see no browser plugin here.

OBM has numerous plugins - the CRM functionality is a plugin, and there’s a org chart tool.  Lots of nice stuff in there.  I have to say I was a little shocked at some of the requirements - I need magic_quotes_gpc to be ‘on’, for example.  For a php5 app, this seems a bit aniquated, and I hope it’s something they’ll rectify in a future version. 

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, PHP