0.6.6: Better, Stronger - maybe not faster - and a bit of a roadmap

OpenGoo 0.6.6 is out, with lots of goodies:

• Workspace Hierarchy. It is now possible to create workspaces inside workspaces! This allows for more flexibility to organize your work. For example, you could have in your Company a workspace for Development, which you can now subdivide into workspaces for Programming, Testing, Design, etc. When browsing the Development workspace you can see all of the items of all its child workspaces in a single, unified view.
• Better Search. Searching for you files, contacts or mail is much more user-friendly now. Look and feel, as well as the underlying mechanism, were enhanced to improve your searching experience.
• Better Usability. Adding and editing items is now easier. We put lots of thinking into the User Interface (UI), so we expect an improved overall experience. Feedback is not only welcome, but necessary.
• Small improvements and bug fixing. Many small improvements were made and many bugs were solved. OpenGoo is now compatible with PHP versions 5.0 and 5.1.
• Upgrading. Last but definitely not least, OpenGoo can now be easily upgraded while still keeping your information. Starting from version 0.6.4 you can upgrade OpenGoo by following the instructions on the readme.txt file, and you can enjoy all of the new functionality without any hassle to migrate your previous data.

Next Steps

We are still working on making OpenGoo a more stable product. There are several bugs to fix and things to improve, and there’s a long list of new features to add. OpenGoo is currently beta quality software, so you are not advised to use it on a production environment. However, it is usable, and in fact we ourselves are using it internally. So one more time: use at your discretion.

Some features that will be available on the next (version 0.7, mid-July) release are:

• Sharing items between different workspaces
• Improved task management
• Overall usability issues
• More bugs fixed (less bugs)

Please help OpenGoo by reporting any bugs you find. You can do so at the SourceForge.net tracker for OpenGoo. Thank you!

OpenGoo 0.6.4 released!

This is an important milestone for the OpenGoo project. While still a RC of a Beta, version 0.6.4 has undergone enough testing and bug-fixing as to make it ‘usable’ by potential - non-developer - users.There are still known bugs, plenty of usability issues, and some features we want add before calling it a finished, polished, first version.

We now encourage everyone interested in testing OpenGoo to install version 0.6.4, and share your feedback, either at the Goo Forum, or by the SourceForge bug tracking system.

Thanks everyone for helping grow OpenGoo as a community, and towards becoming the best Online Office (and Knowledge Management) suite!

Welcome the OpenGoo future

Hello Community!

This post is to let you know what the OpenGoo core team has been up to, and also give some welcomin’.

Contrary to what most readers might have been lead to believe by the inactivity of the forum, the situation is exactly what our faithful follower, Eric Klopfer, infered: we are developing like mad!

Version 0.6

By the end of April we will release version 0.6, and we promise it will be impressive. Not only will you see a lot more functionality; 0.6 will even introduce a paradigm twist.

Explaining every addition would make for a too long and technical post. To give you a hint, one important change is the renaming of the “Project” concept to a more abstract “Workspace”. We believe this change makes the concept more appealing to those users that do not organize their work by projects. Project workers will still find the “Workspace” easily representing a Project. But we hope you judge that by yourselves and give us your opinions.

On version 0.6 (still a beta version) we will introduce features like:

• New menu layout
• e-mail integration
• Calendar view
• Improved Contact Management
• Improved Ajax interface

New team members

To the original team of three (Ignacio, Marcos, and Conrado), we have recruited the full time contribution of Carlos Palma (alias ‘Chonwil’). Chonwil is a great coder - soon to be Software Engineer - and great guy.

We are also very glad to announce that another team is starting an UdelaR University sponsored project to further develop OpenGoo (Marcos and Ignacio are about to present their project/thesis).

Students Ignacio Vazquez, Fernando Rodriguez, and Juan Pedro del Campo will be working on OpenGoo, mainly on the Spreadsheets apps and related features.

Again, they will be tutored by Prof. Eduardo Fernandez, with the help of Marcos and mine.

So welcome to the OpenGoo community guys, and thanks for joining the team!

Finally, we have received contributions and many kind words of encouragement from users and fans all over the world. We thank you all, and, if we earn it, keep ‘em coming!

Beta 0.5.1 available for download

More news from the OpenGoo team…

We are releasing a patch with a couple of bugfixes called beta 0.5.1, changes include:

1.- Added checking permissions on tmp folder (as suggested by pepe in the forum).

2.- Solved the “famous” error that prevented saving and uploading files (the workaround worked in all environments we tested). Please let us know if it does not work for you.

3.- Ajax integration. Finally we completed integration with extjs library! Interface is a lot smoother now.

4.- Tabbed working. Using ctrl-click (or right click ‘open in new tab’) you will be able to open new tabs within the OpenGoo interface. It is very handy for people like me that enjoy having lots of open tabs in the browser.

5.- Fixed a bug in the tags filter.

By the way, download is only available through sourceforge.

On April a new version will be released and the following features will be included:

1.- Contact management.  While we are developing this feature, we are looking for somebody to create plugins that synchronize Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird with OpenGoo. If you would like to volunteer please join us.

2.- Events. We will introduce event management soon. If you want to schedule a meeting soon you will be able to do it through OpenGoo.

3.- Advanced features on tasks.

4.- Object linking. Did you just upload a document that you need in order to complete a task? Do you need to read all messages from a specific user? We know that all the objects you manage such as Messages, Documents, Contacts and Tasks are linked in real life, so why not giving the ability to link them in OpenGoo?

5.- Concurrency check. You will be able to check out files, so you can edit them safely knowing that no one will change them while you are editing.

6.- Look and feel will get better and better. We are working on it!

7.- And more improvements that will definitely surprise you …

Come back soon!

P.S.: Upgrade instructions are available on readme.txt.

Beta 0.5 is now available

Great news for the OpenGoo community. Despite January vacations, the OpenGoo development team is back with a new release.

I’ll quickly give you an overview of what’s new in this version. The biggest changes follow:

User interface improvements

You can see in the screenshot below we made slight visual changes to the whole interface. This is not that big a deal, the important thing is what’s behind. We have started using the ext JS library in order to add AJAX capabilities and better browser compatibility (IE 6, Opera 9 and Safari 2 plus Firefox) to OpenGoo. So, minor interface changes for now, big changes in user interface and responsiveness will be coming soon.

In this first screenshot you will also see that a dockable help pane has been added. We don’t have much help written yet, but we are working on it.

File Manager improvements

This version of the file manager is AJAX powered. The functionality remains the same, but the interface is smoother and has some minor improvements, such as thumbnails for pictures. Another change is that the navigation tree is now included in the left pane.

What about Slimey?

We’ve been working a lot in Smiley lately. We have a clean interface and a good level of functionality in our S5 presentation editor. I’ll leave you a screenshot, but you can check it out by downloading and installing.

Small bugs have also been fixed in this version. In our last testing sessions we’ve found lots of improvement opportunities and version 0.6 will definitely have a lot of small corrections.

We are working in a long term, step-by-step roadmap of the new features in OpenGoo, but it is not ready yet.

Please be patient, and know we are always open to receive your help (i.e. by submitting bugs and feature request) .

OpenSocial is cool!

From giving a quick look at the OpenSocial specification, I believe it is great stuff.

Here is an idea: why don’t we make the core of OpenGoo (known to a few of the coders as “The GooKore” implement OpenSocial?

Do you know of any other Open Source platform that is planning/doing this?

Alpha 0.3: And the third release is out!

We are happy to announce that the third alpha release is out: Alpha 0.3.

Improvements over Version 0.2 include:

• New User Interface

• Improved File Browsing

• And several bug fixes

It may not sound as much, but it’s been a lot of work, and we are very glad with the results. Thanks to Marcos and Ignacio for taking on the bulk of the tasks.

There’s still much work to do though, and remember this release is alpha quality which means that it shouldn’t be used for production yet.

Next version will include better slideshow editing, file sharing between users, and bug fixes, so please report any bugs you might find.

Open Source Web Office on the radio!

On its second episode of the 5th season, LUGRadio, a Linux radio show from England, discussed:

Where’s our open source online office suite going to come from? There are plenty of web-based office programs now, but none of them are open source. Can the free software community build a project like this, and do we need to?

We will have to forgive LUGRadio for not knowing OpenGoo. We are a new project, rather small yet, and most of the team is currently in Uruguay! …and they are funny… and have an English accent.

Plus, someone pointed to OpenGoo in their forums. Maybe they would discuss OpenGoo on their show. We will let them know when our next release comes out. We hope it will surprise a lot of the audience.

Why Adobe and Microsoft will fail at the Web Office game

There are a couple of interesting news this morning regarding the Web Office field. Adobe is buying a company called Virtual Ubiquity, developer of buzzword, and online Word Processor that runs on Adobe Flex (Flash).

Microsoft is announcing an online file management service. It will probably look a lot like the Google Apps file manager. It makes a lot of sense: it can’t get much better than that at the moment. What it still does not offer is the online editing of documents.

There are many critics that can be done to both services. It all has to do with the agendas of these -too big- players.

Adobe is trying to push its Flex thing. They did such a good job with Flash that they think they could own a bit of the Internet this way.

Microsoft is trying to keep you buying the three digits licenses for their Office Suites, so they can’t give you a better product for free.

In pursuing more than one goal with their products, it will be very hard to focus for these two. Yahoo+Zimbra, Zoho, ThinkFree, still more players to come, and of course OpenGoo; all have better chances on succeeding in this field. We are focused.

The offline Web Office

The most common argument against the Web Office is the “What if I don’t have an Internet connection?” question.

While it is true that Internet connection reliability improves by the week, there will always be a case for lost connection for many years to come.

We also know that something will come up in the next few years (months?) that will allow this to be done very easily. But we don’t know what or when, right? - At least I am not too convinced by Google Gears yet.

So my questions are:

• When should OpenGoo start addressing this issue?
• How are we going to address this issue?

Zoho is both using Google Gears and working on a MS-Office plugin - Thanks to Marcos “El Cabeza” for the last link).
- Hey, this guys don’t cease to impress me!

Zimbra and Think free are doing something about it too.

Any ideas?