Forum OpenACS Q&A: Announcing Project/Open V3.0 alpha for PostgreSQL
Here is a brief update of how things are going after two months of intensive porting work of three senior developers...
The current version of Project/Open has "alpha" status and includes several new feature:
- Simplified GUI, suitable for "non-techies"
- Runs on PostgreSQL 7.3 and 8.0 and Oracle 8i
- Is fully localized. However, "translations" exist only for English at the moment
- All read- and write "transactions" are protected via "user privileges".
- A new financial management module is included that allows to calculate profit and loss per project and customer. The distribution function for payroll costs is still missing at this moment.
- Maintenance screens allow to manage user privileges and to assign them to "user profiles" (for example: Employees, Freelancers, Sales, ...)
- Menus are dynamically configurable. Maintenance screens allow to modify them.
- P/O modules can define "components" (called "portlets" by others, but these ones work ... 😊 that appear in the "ViewPage" (the pages that show the details of a business object such as a project, a customer, etc...) of other modules. A maintenance screens allows to customize the location and appearance of components.
- All business objects supports full backup to .CSV files (Microsoft Excel) and full recovery from .CSV files. This allows easy migrations between versions.
- Errors can be reported to a centralized server via a "Report this Error" button
- There exists a "subadministration matrix" that defines which user profiles can administer other user profiles. For example, Employees may have the right to administer Freelancers.
- P/O now allows for the customization of the GUI: There are currently a "default blue" and a "light green" design available.
Check it out! There is a demo server (with the older version 2.1) at http://ptdemo.dnsalias.com/. The code is available via:
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:mailto:anonymous@berlin.dnsalias.com:/home/cvsroot checkout intranet-core
After downloading and installing the "core", you can check the other modules:
intranet-big-brother
intranet-cost
intranet-crm-tracking
intranet-dynvals (Oracle only)
intranet-filestorage
intranet-forum
intranet-hr
intranet-invoices
intranet-payments
intranet-riskmanagement (Oracle only)
intranet-timesheet
Please drop us a note if you have successfully installed the software (or comment to us in the support area below if you found an issue...).
Most of these modules are GPLed. All of these modules are free to use and modify for everybody. Redistribution rights are limited because we want to participate with a fair share (20%) if somebody else is going to earn serious money with a software that he didn't write...
Also, there are some very first Windows(!) installation instructions available at: http://project-open.org/download/wininstall/. However, Linux still remains our main development platform. It's just that our target customer group is not very IT savvy... 😊
Our developer community (support, discussions, bug tracker, etc...) is located at Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/
This way we hope to attract the attention of the general open-source community. Maybe OpenACS can also benefit from this...
We hope to be able to deliver the final version V3.0 in early December 2004. The roadmap for the next two months include:
- Finishing our QC checklist to include all new modules and use cases
- QCin the PostgreSQL versions on Linux
- QCin the Oracle version on Linux
- QCin the PostgreSQL version on Windows
- Finishing the Windows installer (probably based on the PostgreSQL 8.0 Windows installer)
Also, we acquired a large corporate customer for our Project/Translation solution, so that we finally have to get down to the user documentation before December:
- P/O Installation Guide
- P/O Maintenance Guide
- P/O Configuration Guide
- P/O Users Guide
- P/O Translation PM Guide
- P/O Accountants Guide
- P/O Freelancers Guide
Apart from that there are currently 5 Spanish students in Barcelona at La Salle University and the Universidad Autonoma doing their final thesis about Knowledge Management and Project/Open with the modules:
- Advanced Search (PostgreSQL and Oracle search with permissions and basic abstracting)
- Expert Finder (search for domain experts using semantic classification of documents via Bayesian networks)
- Customized bulletin boards with priorization similar to "SpamBayes"
- An associative GUI browser (á la http://www.kurzweilai.net/ "The Brain") (negotiating)
Finally I want to express my thanks for the great work of the team members who participated in the efforts so far:
- Marc Baiges
- Alejandro Beya
- Klaus Hofeditz
- Juanjo Ruiz
- Santi Trenchs
- Toni Vila
- Pol Vilarmau
and to Emiliano Duch from Competitiveness.com for providing us with exellent coffee...
Bests,
Frank
