Thanks @mrmarkuz
SOGo appealed (when I researched) because I’d prefer to assemble a set of things which aren’t necessarily so integrated but where each one does its main thing best without too much overlap (last night I read The Trouble In Calendars which reflects the concern I have). Specifically I didn’t want to get involved with NextCloud and the like as I was also looking for relatively lightweight server applications. Is WebTop built on top of NextCloud?
Maybe I can ask a related question here. NextCloud does give a nice solution for cloud storage and OnlyOffice would be nice to have if I don’t have to work too hard to maintain it. But I was concerned that using NextCloud would make it harder to have my storage directly - and smoothly - available on the desktop, whether via Samba, SSHFS or DAV. Without having used these systems yet, I don’t quite understand how NextCloud can talk to a storage backend (something I could, ideally, back up directly/independently) and still manage file versions and so on, while at the same time I can access the same storage via Samba or DAV and see a sane file layout and also not wreck any versioning going on in the background. It seems to me that that can only be possible if all the access is done through one layer which manages the storage. Will NextCloud or WebTop or whatever handle that for me? I am inclined to avoid the headaches and stick with a simple file system on top of which I would apply whatever access mechanisms I want.
For perspective, right now on my home server I have a basic file system which is accessible via sshfs, or Samba, or a DAV web interface which talks to the Samba. The only versioning support I have (and it has been enough) is a separate backup drive maintained with rdiffbackup which lets me look at how the files were at various points in the past.
NethServer is a great option in that it brings us a set of packages which are better integrated than a regular Linux distro does with its package manager, but I’m still a little confused by the package and implementation decisions I need to make…
If you can tell me that WebTop does allow functions like that to work together relatively seamlessly, I’ll be very happy.
I wrote a lot there but the essential question is: If I go with WebTop, if it’s built from a number of different packages which I might not have wanted to set up independently, am I going to see big benefits from the integration which WebTop and NethServer add? Particularly in the areas of groupware and file/content management and storage.