Future ... and Poll

[Caeies]

Hi all,

As some of you already know, I'm officially the new phpGroupWare
maintainer from the FSF point of view. I want to thanks Dave / skwashd
for all the work he has made as the FSF maintainer of this project.

We have recently hardly discuss about the death of the project. It seems
that we want to try to make it alive :).

Maat did a good job by reworking the svn tree, making it easier to
understand. Thanks for that.

Sigurd seems to have things to commit in his branch (btw is this on the
=2E16 base or .18 ?). I'm waiting for this to speak about that after.

I don't want to start a "blabla" thread. But I want to know what you
think about the real added values of phpGW :
- do you think that the building of custom module is important ?
- do you think that having a high level API is important ?
- do you think that the intermodule communication is important ?
- do you think that the number of proposed module is important ?
- do you think that having an easy setup is important
- do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with other
groupware is important ?
- do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with
specialized devices is important ?
- do you think that being able to easily brand phpgroupware is important=
?
- what kind of applications are important ? why ?
- other things that I forgot ?

Please, keep in mind that we have the following things already well
running :
-> google apps (shared calendar, shared documents, mail, ...) and their
concurrent.
-> API : Zend Framework, symfony, cakePHP, ...
-> other groupwares in java / php / python / whatever ...

So, in short : where can we add value to our project, what are our
strengths for YOU developers ? (users are welcome to give their feedback
too :).

Beeing free software is important for all of US (at least I hope !). But
we need to go ahead, rebuilding a strong community of contributing
developer and not only users.

[Maât]

Post by Caeies
Hi all,
As some of you already know, I'm officially the new phpGroupWare
maintainer from the FSF point of view.

No comment on that. For the while we have more urgent questions to deal
with... first of all : can we give a new life to this project :)

Post by Caeies
I want to thanks Dave / skwashd
for all the work he has made as the FSF maintainer of this project.

agreed :)

Post by Caeies
We have recently hardly discuss about the death of the project. It seems
that we want to try to make it alive :).

/me votes for life rather than death :)

Post by Caeies
Maat did a good job by reworking the svn tree, making it easier to
understand. Thanks for that.

:)

Now a single svn checkout allows people to have a working copy ready to
test or code.

Next i'll publish a quick howto get started on phpGW with Eclipse PDT
(Eclipse IDE for PHP with many cool features that make phpGroupWare
hacking and debugging easier)

Post by Caeies
Sigurd seems to have things to commit in his branch (btw is this on the
=2E16 base or .18 ?). I'm waiting for this to speak about that after.

Sigurd can work in his brand new dedicated repository so that we can
cherry pick cool features and commit them into base repository :)

Post by Caeies
I don't want to start a "blabla" thread. But I want to know what you
- do you think that the building of custom module is important ?

It's important to let this possibility imho.
Though we cannot expect people to start coding new apps on our base
before a new stable and sexy version is published.

Post by Caeies
- do you think that having a high level API is important ?

Yes also

Post by Caeies
- do you think that the intermodule communication is important ?

It's a killer feature that no other groupware offer atm

Post by Caeies
- do you think that the number of proposed module is important ?

no

Post by Caeies
- do you think that having an easy setup is important

yes * 1000

Post by Caeies
- do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with other
groupware is important ?

yes this also is a killer feature that no other groupware offer atm

and that would perhaps allow to create things like groupware based
social networks without central node with the ability for people to well
control their personal datas :)

Post by Caeies
- do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with
specialized devices is important ?

for me no but i know many people cannot live without that

and we have jonhang GSoC work for that now :)

Post by Caeies
- do you think that being able to easily brand phpgroupware is important=
?

what d'you mean there ?

Post by Caeies
- what kind of applications are important ? why ?

Depends on the user need ... i proposed long ago to make several flavors
of phpGroupWare with various sets of applications optimised for specific
purposes.

-- personal communicationware : webmail + calendar + notes
-- project management groupware (tasks + tts + ged)
-- facilities management ( property + ....)

i think we can find others classical usage patterns

that would make us the first flavored GroupWare

Post by Caeies
- other things that I forgot ?
Please, keep in mind that we have the following things already well
-> google apps (shared calendar, shared documents, mail, ...) and their
concurrent.
-> API : Zend Framework, symfony, cakePHP, ...
-> other groupwares in java / php / python / whatever ...
So, in short : where can we add value to our project, what are our
strengths for YOU developers ? (users are welcome to give their feedback
too :).
Beeing free software is important for all of US (at least I hope !). But
we need to go ahead, rebuilding a strong community of contributing
developer and not only users.

i'm using phpGroupWare as a basis for ged but the need is raising for a
really good task/project manager with module linking with email for
notifications and ged for documents related to the tasks

perhaps a link with calendar for gant displaying would be great too
(later because Gantt displaying is really a difficult thing to do with a
web app)

i think we can at least make phpGroupWare a leading project-management
dedicated groupware... wich would allow us to attract small companies as
"customers"

[Chris Weiss]

Post by Maât

 - do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with other
groupware is important ?

yes this also is a killer feature that no other groupware offer atm

this depends on what you mean by "communicate". From where I'm
standing, most serious groupware systems can communicate with other
systems.

as a use-case example, my vendor sends me a meeting request, I accept
and it gets added to my calendar and he gets a response confirming I
accepted. This works now, I've been a part of it with Exchange on one
side and gmail/gcal on the other. I would expect any groupware that
supports email and iCal would work too.

if you mean something beyond that, like calendar and
addressbook/contacts sharing, some groupware's also already do this.
things like LDAP and iCal make it rather easy.

At work we're using Kerio, and it goes as far as to provide a link to
users so they can let others subscribe to their Kerio calendar from
anything that supports iCal. it's read-only, but it's still
communication.

[Maât]

Post by Chris Weiss

Post by Maât

Post by Caeies
- do you think that having a groupware able to communicate with other
groupware is important ?

yes this also is a killer feature that no other groupware offer atm

this depends on what you mean by "communicate". From where I'm
standing, most serious groupware systems can communicate with other
systems.
as a use-case example, my vendor sends me a meeting request, I accept
and it gets added to my calendar and he gets a response confirming I
accepted. This works now, I've been a part of it with Exchange on one
side and gmail/gcal on the other. I would expect any groupware that
supports email and iCal would work too.
if you mean something beyond that, like calendar and
addressbook/contacts sharing, some groupware's also already do this.
things like LDAP and iCal make it rather easy.
At work we're using Kerio, and it goes as far as to provide a link to
users so they can let others subscribe to their Kerio calendar from
anything that supports iCal. it's read-only, but it's still
communication.

Yep... you're right i must explain what i meant.

when i want to plan a meeting some groupwares allow to check local
people availability... but for other not locally known pople this is not
possible.

groupwares able to communicate with each other could ask for
availability to have a meeting distributed planner that even notes dones
not offer.

(that would also need to control what data you want to make available to
what groupware)

same thing for addressbook : communication between groupwares would
allow to automatically complete fields clicking on retrieve/sync data
from reference groupware

that could also be true for ged : sharing documentss across several
groupwares and making relations between these documents

same thing for tasks... we could have a project done by several
compagnies each having to do a part of the job but tasks obviously would
be inter-dependant

having dependancy relations between tasks distributed on several
groupwares would allow a better co-operation

that sorts of "communication" between groupwares today are offered by no
groupware afaik

we could also imagine data synchronisation between wikis pages (or
groups of pages) or synchronization between knowledge bases

[Chris Weiss]

Post by Maât
we could also imagine data synchronisation between wikis pages (or
groups of pages) or synchronization between knowledge bases

something like http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki ?

[Maât]

Post by Chris Weiss

Post by Maât
we could also imagine data synchronisation between wikis pages (or
groups of pages) or synchronization between knowledge bases

something like http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki ?

i must admit that the iddea of a semantic groupware is really sexy :)

this could be the start point of something really new and really different !

[Olivier Berger]

Post by Maât
i'm using phpGroupWare as a basis for ged

for non-french speakers : GED == "Gestion Electronique de Documents",
i.e Documents management system (ECM ?) ;)

My two cents as a lurker.

PS: Stabilizing a stable and secure version would be an important
concern, IMHO, i.e. Distribution packagers need to be able to stabilize
an official update of their packages that will no-longer be including
"floating" patches that were not part officially of a major release from
you guys ;)